- Develop a diagnostic tool or script specifically for end devices (desktops and servers) to verify the communication between agents and beacons
This is to help customers - to understand what exactly the issue with endpoints -whenever there is any agent fails to communicate with the beacon.
The tool should have an input page - to enter - beacon hostname, proxy server name and then the tool should be able to test nslook up, telnet, ping, etc., to beacon and tell what is the communication error if there is any.
Also, it is good to have an advanced option to check TLS check as well.
Thanks for the suggestion Rajesh, this is quite timely as I will be very soon posting a blog about a new tool that has been created for the beacons which monitors the status of:
Whether services such as Beacon Engine is running
If the number of files in Incoming Directories is too high
Whether there are any connection issues and also whether TLS is enabled on both beacon and parent server.
I understand that your main suggestion was to cover the communication between agents and beacons, hopefully this new tool will help showcase some of the ideas we are working on to help troubleshoot common issues more easily.
(Anything expressed here is my own view and not necessarily that of my employer, Flexera) If the solution provided has helped, please mark it as such as this helps everyone to know what works.
Well as a sneak preview, here's what is on it's way:
Main Dashboard page
The above is what the main page looks like and then each can be selected to drill into a detail page, an example of the TLS page is:
Drill down on TLS tile
Let me know your thoughts!
(Anything expressed here is my own view and not necessarily that of my employer, Flexera) If the solution provided has helped, please mark it as such as this helps everyone to know what works.
This dashboard looking great. But I feel, it will monitor the beacon's health primarily and probably after agent successfully reports to beacon atleast once.
However, my point was even before we install the agent, we should be able to verify the connectivity of the computers to the intended beacon. In my experience, when we start deploying agents, there are communication issues that usually arise because of many internal security controls and customers usually ask us what is the issue, so we usually endup testing (connectivity to beacon) one after another like a port test, ping test, dns check, tls check etc., If we have a handy tool which can test all the agent communication tests in one go, it will be time-saving and customer knows what exactly needs to be fixed. If we can run the same across domain, it would be much better to know machine wise communication issues
When I first started the design on this project I looked at agent tool and centralised app server tool as well and after taking multiple factors into account went with the beacon tool for the first phase.
Down the line there is scope for both an agent tool and a centralised app server tool however I want to get the beacon one more complete first as this is where most issues occur across the board.
For example, many agent connectivity issues are because the beacon is not configured correctly so if we address this, it helps with agent rollout.
To address the specific agent issues that are unrelated to the beacon we need to consider each operating system the agents can run on which will obviously take a lot longer than focusing on just Windows to start with as we can with the beacon.
So please don't lose hope, we will do something to help with agents but it will be after the beacon tool is more complete.
(Anything expressed here is my own view and not necessarily that of my employer, Flexera) If the solution provided has helped, please mark it as such as this helps everyone to know what works.
(Anything expressed here is my own view and not necessarily that of my employer, Flexera) If the solution provided has helped, please mark it as such as this helps everyone to know what works.
