TEM Agent on android - serious battery drainer

Usage and Config MDM
1

(imported topic written by EliShapurov)

Hello,

I have several agents installed on Galaxy S2, Galaxy S3 and Galaxy Nexus devices.

I enabled command polling with 86400 seconds value (ones a day).

I can see that TEM agent is creating a serious number of wakelocks. On average, it

is 1 hour wakelock (91 wakelocks) during 15 hours of phone running. It is number 1 wakelock

in BetterBatteryStats.

I can see in agent log that it is constantly doing something:

At 15:03:47 +0300 -

Report posted successfully.

At 15:05:37 +0300 -

ActionLogMessage: (action 1117) Action signature verified

At 15:11:01 +0300 -

Report posted successfully.

At 15:11:03 +0300 -

ActionLogMessage: (action 1117) Action signature verified

At 15:11:21 +0300 -

ActionLogMessage: (action 1117) Action signature verified

At 15:16:34 +0300 -

Report posted successfully.

At 15:19:04 +0300 -

Report posted successfully.

At 15:23:47 +0300 -

Report posted successfully.

At 15:28:19 +0300 -

ActionLogMessage: (action 1117) Action signature verified

At 15:31:59 +0300 -

Report posted successfully.

At 15:35:56 +0300 -

ActionLogMessage: (action 1117) Action signature verified

At 15:42:35 +0300 -

Report posted successfully.

At 15:46:16 +0300 -

ActionLogMessage: (action 1117) Action signature verified

At 15:47:04 +0300 -

Report posted successfully.

At 15:52:23 +0300 -

Report posted successfully.

At 15:54:57 +0300 -

ActionLogMessage: (action 1117) Action signature verified

At 16:01:46 +0300 -

Report posted successfully.

At 16:04:23 +0300 -

Report posted successfully.

At 16:08:12 +0300 -

ActionLogMessage: (action 1117) Action signature verified

At 16:14:57 +0300 -

Report posted successfully.

At 16:17:04 +0300 -

Report posted successfully.

At 16:17:27 +0300 -

ActionLogMessage: (action 1117) Action signature verified

At 16:21:03 +0300 -

Report posted successfully.

At 16:22:32 +0300 -

ActionLogMessage: (action 1117) Action signature verified

Anybody else see this issue ?

2

(imported comment written by BenKus)

Hi Eli,

The default is to periodically wake up the OS to check to make sure there is nothing new for us to report… In our testing on multiple devices, we see an average of 2% battery usage, which seems like it is fair…

Note the battery usage is tune-able either by using pre-selected battery modes (see the “Android Agent Setting: Configure Power Settings” Fixlet).

Here are some suggestions:

  • Check your battery usage at: Settings > About Phone > Battery – If it is significantly over 2% battery usage, something might be wrong (maybe something about your deployment is driving extra battery use).
  • Can you check action 1117? What is that? It seems like a strange entry in the log.
  • If you want to play with the battery usage (like to eliminate any wake locks), then feel free to play with the settings using that battery configuration Fixlet.

Hope that helps,

Ben

3

(imported comment written by EliShapurov)

Hi,

Thank you for reply. I checked the action 1117 and it was a baseline action that had single component - “Android Agent Setting: Enable Command Polling” task running as a policy with “re-apply when relevant” option. I removed the re-apply option and will see if this help.

Meanwhile, I can see that TEM agent is taking around 6% of battery usage. I started to play with “Android Agent Setting: Configure Power Settings” - as it seems exactly what I need. However, I did not find a detailed information about it’s options (well, they pretty self explainable, but anyway) - can you point me to some PDF/HTML that describes this fixlet options ?

Thank you

4

(imported comment written by BenKus)

Hmmm… That is interesting…

Since that Enable Command Polling task is basically always relevant, I bet here is what happened:

  • Your agent went to run the action every time it noticed it was relevant, which seemed to be every 5-15 minutes.
  • Since the settings was already enabled, it didn’t actually change anything, but it did trigger the action and higher CPU to do all the reporting.
  • This frequently running action not only caused more CPU, but it prevented the agent from sleeping on its normal schedule (since it felt it needed to run the action rather than sleep to save battery).

I bet the change you made already fixed the issue…

I guess the lesson here is that if you have a constantly running action, it can affect battery usage… Thanks for reporting this as I think others will benefit from reading this…

Ben

5

(imported comment written by BenKus)

I added a wiki page here to answer questions about power usage:

https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/wikis/home?lang=en#/wiki/Tivoli%20Endpoint%20Manager/page/Mobile%20Battery%20Usage

Hope that helps,

Ben