Removing obsolete agents from the console

When agents are no longer used on the company’s workstations, they continue to appear in the monitoring table of the Environment > Agents panel in the console, and are counted in the number of agents that the license allows.

We recommend that you keep your agent list up to date to avoid exceeding the number of agents that your license allows, and populating the database with agents that no longer exist.

There are two ways in which you can clean up your list: automatically and periodically removing agents or merging duplicates.

The Agent logs - Modify privilege is required to delete obsolete logs.

Offline agents can be deleted automatically. This feature is configured separately for each agent group and takes place at regular intervals. It addresses the following scenarios:

  • When a workstation is remastered after an employee leaves the company, changes computers or because the workstation required an operating system update, for example.
  • When a computer is no longer used in the company.
  • When an agent was uninstalled on the workstation even though it was disconnected from the agent handler when it was uninstalled.

To schedule the periodic and automatic deletion of agents that have not connected to agent handlers for a specified duration:

  1. Select an agent group in the Environment > Agents menu and click on Edit at the top right side.
  2. In a group’s Status and logs tab, go to the Agent real time monitoring section.
  3. Set the number of days for the Automatic deletion after parameter. The default value is 30 days.

Automatic deletion tasks are launched at 2 a.m. The time cannot be changed.

If an agent that was deleted from the console attempts to connect again to its agent handler, a new identity will be assigned to it.

Duplicates are merged globally on all agents. This operation is manual and with instantaneous results. It addresses the following scenarios:

  • When a workstation is remastered but the same computer name is kept.
  • When you do not want to wait until the next automatic deletion of offline agents.

To merge duplicate agents:

  1. Select All agents in the Environment > Agents menu.
  2. Go to the Maintenance tab.
  3. Select a Criterion for duplicate display:
    • Active Directory name: when all the workstations are in the Active Directory, the Active Directory name is the best criterion as it guarantees the uniqueness of agents, so any duplicates detected can be deleted.
    • Computer name or NetBIOS name: these criteria can be chosen if some of the workstations are not in the Active Directory, because in general these are unique names.
    • IP address: this criterion can be chosen when several hosts in the company’s pool have the same names. However, several hosts may share the same IP address, so use this criterion with caution.
  4. Select one or several lines. Each line shows both agents; the one that connected most recently is shown first.
  5. Click on Merge. All grayed out agents will be removed from the database.