Limit bandwidth taken by self-upgrade of agents

[kevin_christens]

We are have concerns that bandwidth between a beacons and managed devices is reaching threshold limits and impacting other services when we enable self-upgrade of the agents.   Is there a tool either recommended or available from Flexera that could be used to limit the number of simultaneous requests for downloading the new agents to a managed device?

something similar to the algorithms used in Low Extra Delay Background Transport (LEDBAT)
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LEDBAT 

Building target lists of thousands of devices is time consuming and a maintenance issue.

Thank you.

[JohnSorensenDK · Accepted solution]

@kevin_christens 

I haven't tested it but maybe you could utilize IIS functionality to limit the bandwidth, you may to refer to Microsoft documentation, e.g. starting from Limits for a Web Site 

Please reporting your findings here for other forum members benefit if you think it could be useful.

Thanks,

[kevin_christens]

Thank you John.
This is very interesting.   I am guessing I would would first need to determine what minimal bandwidth would be required successfully allow agent self-updates to download without causing the update to stop and have to restart from the beginning.  Is the agent able to resume an interrupted download or would it need to download the entire package again since starting over would make self-updating take forever?

[ChrisG]

If a download is interrupted, I believe the agent will cache what has been downloaded so far and them resume from where it left off the next time policy is updated. (It's many years since I have considered that behavior though, so it might be worth doing a quick test to confirm.)

The way you described the objective here is does sound like you're looking to control this from the server (beacon) side. However for awareness there are a range of agent preferences that can be configured which will limit the bandwidth used by the agent for downloads. See:

• NetworkMaxRate
• NetworkSpeed (the documentation on this page references several other related preferences)

(Historical note: these preferences are a hangover from days gone by when the agent's primary purpose was downloading and installing software, often on networks that were slow and unreliable.)

Note that you would need to find a way to configur these settings in the registry (Windows) or agent's config.ini file (Unix-like operating systems) on each computer. There is nothing built in to FlexNet Manager Suite to control this configuration centrally (e.g. through agent policy).