BigFix - Keep your agent healthy
One of the many powers of BigFix is the BigFix agent.? The agent is powerful, robust, and highly customizable and very reliable.? As a former customer I rarely ran into agent issues like some of the other products out there. But sometimes the agent needs to looked and refined with some additional troubleshooting.? BigFix offers many built in utilities and tools to troubleshoot and keep your agents healthy.? Below are some strategies to help you take keep your environment and agents healthy and resolve issues automatically.?
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BES Client Helper Service- I recommend to create a policy action inside your BigFix environment to install the BES Client Helper Service once any newly installed agents check in.? This is a built in utility that periodically checks to see if the BigFix agent service is running.? You also can customize how often it checks to see if the BigFix Service is running.? If the service is stopped the helper service will attempt to restart it, next it will remove the revocation file and then restart it.? Then if both of those actions fail to start it will remove the BESData folder and try to restart it one last time.? By default, the helper will check to see if the agent is running once a day.? Here is a link to the documentation of the BESClient Helper
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To create a policy action find the fixlet “Install BES Client Helper Service” under BES Support
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Select Take Action
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Select Preset and Select Policy
Select Dynamically Target by Property
Select All Computers
Select OK to Take Action
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This will Install the BES Client Helper Service to all computers and any new computer that Checks in
You will see the service under windows services
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You will also see statistics of the BESCleint helper service under the deployment health checks by going to BigFix Management
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Select Deployment Health Checks
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Scroll to the BES Client Health Section and you will see the BES Client Helper Statistics
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领英推荐
Use Windows Task Scheduler to Restart the BESAgent
Find the “Automatically Restart Stopped BES Clients Using TaskScheduler” fixlet under BES Support
Select Take Action
Type in the time you would like to schedule in 24 hour format
Select Preset and Select Policy
Select Dynamically Target by Property
Select All Computers
Select OK to Take Action
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This will create an action to use the builtin windows task scheduler to check to see if the BigFix agent is running each day and attempt to restart it once a day
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Resetting the BigFix Agent
If the agent is failing to respond after restarting the service this action works great its like resetting the agent back to factory defaults.? What this does it is it removes the BESdata folder under the client folder and also removes keys under HKLM\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\BigFix\EnterpriseClient\Settings
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Using the BesRemove Utility
Finally the last resort is to remove the agent using the BESRemove Utility at software.bigfix.com
Run the BESRemove Utility and remove the BigFix agent. This will remove all traces of the BigFix agent and you can now reinstall the agent.
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Bigfix Administrator | Linux platform
6 个月Hi Brad, Just checking to see when this “BES Client Helper Service” will be available for the other OS platforms, particularly for Ubuntu Linux installations.