Maintain Continuous Operation with watchdog

The Agent Installer includes a watchdog process to ensure continued operation of these standalone agents and their related processes:

  • Agent Installer Platform Daemon
  • Machine Agent

If you integrate the Agent Installer with systemd, a profile is created for the watchdog process to ensure that it starts after a planned or unplanned reboot of the system. The systemd profile also restarts the watchdog process if it was terminated during regular operation.

If you do not integrate the Agent Installer with systemd (by setting --systemd=false), you can create a systemd profile after installation.

If you do not have a systemd profile, then you must start the watchdog process manually to ensure operation of the standalone agents and their related processes.

Note: If you enabled the SELinux module on your system, then you must configure it to ensure that the watchdog and other Agent Installer Platform processes are not blocked.

To start the watchdog:

<install-directory> bin/zfictl start

To stop the watchdog:

<install-directory> bin/zfictl stop

See Agent Installer for more information.

Start or Stop Individual Agents

You can use the watchdog process to start and stop individual agents (Machine or Zero) on the Agent Installer Platform. You can also view or print the status of the managed agents.

For example, to start the Machine Agent, enter:

<install-directory> bin/zfictl start machine
Starting Machine Agent
...
Machine Agent started successfully

For example, to stop the Zero Agent, enter:

<install-directory> bin/zfictl stop zero
Stopping Zero Agent
...
Zero Agent stopped successfully

To view or print the status of the managed agents, enter:

<install-directory> bin/zfictl status