Report unavailable clients/nodes

[lopezh]

We had a network incident where our servers briefly lost connectivity to the storage and the filesystems had gone read-only. Now when /var (Unix/Linux)/(where the BES Client runs off from) is in read-only, that particular node/client will be unavailable in the Bigfix console (not just greyed out). Is there a way to report such event? Like is Bigfix able to detect that a node that used to be in the list is now unavailable but not deliberately removed (like if a server is decommissioned), or ,if a server is in its database but is not being detected as online/active. It is easy to identify which nodes suddenly are offline/unavailable if you have a few but not when they are in the thousands. Your inputs will be highly appreciated. Thank you.

[fermt]

For that case you need to use a monitoring tool. BigFix is not intended for monitoring the availability of endpoints.

[JasonWalker]

I’m not sure I understand what you mean - the endpoints disappeared from the console, as if they were deleted?

Did the storage outage affect the root server as well, or possibly thr machine where you were running thr console? That might be explainable if the cobsole cache were corrupted.

A storage outage affecting your endpoints shouldn’t affect the server/console view - they should behave like endpoints that aren’t reporting, and eventually go grayed-out on the console.

[lopezh]

Thank you for your inputs @fermt @JasonWalker

@fermt
–We do have a separate monitoring tool, which, unfortunately, has the same problem when the filesystem where its agent runs from goes read-only, it disappears in the tool since the agent cannot report its status/state to the server.

[lopezh]

@JasonWalker - Yep, they disappear in the console like there were deleted. Once the servers were rebooted, they came back.

I am not sure but the bes root server was itself rebooted and was working normally and only the endpoints that had readonly filesystems were ‘invisible’ to the console. Is there a way to run a query on the command line to validate that the endpoint is still in the DB just not visible in the console? (An endpoint that was deliberately deleted should not come up).