Agent Upgrade Best Practices

This lesson will provide high-level visibility to the upgrade process of the Scalable Agent in order to assist with preparation and planning of an Agent version increment within an organization.

Asset Vision can provide usage, service, and extended inventory information via the use of a Scalable Agent component. Every so often, Scalable Software will provide updates to the Agent in order to keep the system up-to-date with the latest bug fixes and features, to be made available as part of a standard Asset Vision system update. However, the Agent is NEVER upgraded without consent of the Asset Vision Administrator, therefore allowing adherence to the change control process defined by the organization.

Agent Upgrade Overview

A new Agent version is made available to an instance as soon as Scalable Software releases the new version.  By default, existing Agents will remain at their current version and will not upgrade until they are instructed to do so by the Asset Vision Administrator.  This is done so within the Asset Vision UI by flagging specific Agent record(s) as available for an upgrade.

When an Agent is flagged for upgrade, the upgrade itself does not take place until the agent transmits in during its regularly-scheduled transmit time (within 24 hours, if the computer is connected to the internet during that time). Because the agents transmit time is randomly selected within a configurable universal window, the upgrades will occur in a somewhat staggered fashion throughout the following 24 hours. In other words, the act of flagging an Agent as “upgrade required” does NOT send any information to the Agent itself to instruct an immediate upgrade.

Before proceeding with the upgrade process, it is a best practice to update any existing Enterprise Asset Management tools used in deploying the Agent (WinINSTALL, System Center, SMS, Group Policy Objects, etc.) with the newly-updated package. This will be helpful in keeping old agents from being re-introduced into the environment once the upgrade is complete, as well as help keep track of the Agent upgrade rollout itself. If an old agent package is deployed in an environment where all current agents have already upgraded, the old agent will simply remain on the system until it is flagged to be upgraded.

Agent Upgrade Checklist

Upon notification from Scalable Software about an available new Scalable Agent version, the following list can be used to help plan the upgrade process:

  • Select a number of machines in the environment with an existing Agent that will be used for testing the upgrade.  An ideal test group would be diverse in location (LAN, WAN, VPN, External), OS version, and hardware configuration.
  • Flag the test Agents for upgrade via the Machines with Agents view under Setup in the Asset Vision UI.
  • Monitor the test Agents over the next 24 hours and verify proper Agent and machine functionality.
  • Based on observations from the upgrade tests, submit any change requests required for an enterprise-wide Agent upgrade, taking into consideration time constraints and resource availability
  • Obtain the new installation package from the link available in the Asset Vision UI, and update any asset management solution with the new agent package.
  • As per the change control request, begin flagging Agents for upgrade.

Useful information about the Agent Upgrade

  • Amount of bi-directional traffic is typically 28-32MB total, including overhead.
  • The client machine does not typically need to be restarted to complete the upgrade.
  • If an agent upgrade fails (maybe because of a Windows lock on an old Agent file), then the upgrade will roll back to the previous version, with no adverse effect to the computer or functionality of the original agent.