Recommended Setup for Gateway and Updates?

8 years ago

Hi Victor, I can at least give some guidance on the cloud metering in conjunction with gateways. There are two separate cloud / web metering features available, and I do not know which one you are having issues with. I'll just describe them both. 1. The oldest one, called web metering , in which you can define your own web patterns in SLM and have them propagated to the agents as a file called webapps.config, will update the patterns on agent restart. For most agents this is only done when the computer is restarted. Agents 3.x and 6.x is restarted whe the computer restarts. Agents 5.x restarted themeselves every few hours. Unfortunately there is not much you can do about this. 2. The newer one, called cloud application metering, gets its rules from the DIS team, and these kind of rules cannot be edited or added manually by anybody else. This feature is enabled in SMACC for Inventory, and the rules are sent to the agents as webmetering.rules files. The frequency for cloud application metering is configurable in the agent.config file as a <SystemSetting> called <Setting key="http.poll_interval" value="123456 " /> The value is set in seconds, and tells the agent how often to check in with the inventory server for new binaries, configs or cloud app pattern updates. I believe the standard value is 6 hours, but maybe yours is conciderably higher? There is usually no reason for the agent to try to fetch updates more often than that, and even if the handshake is a pretty small task you might want to keep the network traffic and load of the inventory server down. Adding or removing a gateway will not affect the propagation of web rules for any of these methods. The gateway is just a proxy forwarding the request to the master server, which is done instantly. Regarding your question about a service gateway for the servers, I do not think you will have issues with performance by adding another 400 - 500 machines to the current gatewayif your total computer count is approx 2000 agents. The bottleneck would be the master server anyway, so it doesn't really help from a performance perspective to add more gateways if the master is overloaded. One reason you might want to set up a separate gateway for them is if you want to "shield" the servers from talking directly to the inventory master server. There might be other conciderations too though, but this is probably best answered by others in the community. :-)

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Portal User
8 years ago
Hi Victor, I can at least give some guidance on the cloud metering in conjunction with gateways. There are two separate cloud / web metering features available, and I do not know which one you are having issues with. I'll just describe them both. 1. The oldest one, called web metering , in which you can define your own web patterns in SLM and have them propagated to the agents as a file called webapps.config, will update the patterns on agent restart. For most agents this is only done when the computer is restarted. Agents 3.x and 6.x is restarted whe the computer restarts. Agents 5.x restarted themeselves every few hours. Unfortunately there is not much you can do about this. 2. The newer one, called cloud application metering, gets its rules from the DIS team, and these kind of rules cannot be edited or added manually by anybody else. This feature is enabled in SMACC for Inventory, and the rules are sent to the agents as webmetering.rules files. The frequency for cloud application metering is configurable in the agent.config file as a <SystemSetting> called <Setting key="http.poll_interval" value="123456 " /> The value is set in seconds, and tells the agent how often to check in with the inventory server for new binaries, configs or cloud app pattern updates. I believe the standard value is 6 hours, but maybe yours is conciderably higher? There is usually no reason for the agent to try to fetch updates more often than that, and even if the handshake is a pretty small task you might want to keep the network traffic and load of the inventory server down. Adding or removing a gateway will not affect the propagation of web rules for any of these methods. The gateway is just a proxy forwarding the request to the master server, which is done instantly. Regarding your question about a service gateway for the servers, I do not think you will have issues with performance by adding another 400 - 500 machines to the current gatewayif your total computer count is approx 2000 agents. The bottleneck would be the master server anyway, so it doesn't really help from a performance perspective to add more gateways if the master is overloaded. One reason you might want to set up a separate gateway for them is if you want to "shield" the servers from talking directly to the inventory master server. There might be other conciderations too though, but this is probably best answered by others in the community. :-)
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- Vic_H
  8 years ago
  Thanks Martin, That puts it a bit more into perspective. I know we covered this during training we had losely but not indepth (as it wasn't a thought I had at the time).
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