Replacing an Enterprise Agent Using the Agent Clustering Method

For a variety of reasons, you may need to replace an Enterprise Agent that is currently operational. When replacement is required, you may want to preserve the agent's configuration (such as the agent's name, or settings from the Advanced Settings tab of the agent's entry on the Enterprise Agent page) and the tests and account groups to which the Enterprise Agent has been assigned. The information below provides a process to quickly substitute the new Enterprise Agent for the old, using the ThousandEyes Enterprise Agent cluster feature.

The process below not only makes replacement faster and simpler than manual reconfiguration of an agent, but ensures that organizations that have limits or that are billed for overages to their contracted number of concurrently active Enterprise Agents do not encounter problems due to those limits.

For more information and alternative upgrading methods, see How to Plan for Enterprise Agent Upgrades.

Overview

The replacement process consists principally of the following steps:

1. Create a new cluster using the agent that needs to be replaced.

2. Disable the new cluster.

3. Create the new agent.

4. Add the new agent to the cluster.

5. Delete the old agent.

6. Enable the new cluster or remove the cluster and enable the agent.

For more detailed instructions, see the section below.

Detailed Instructions

1. Create a new cluster using the agent that needs to be replaced.

   Go to the Enterprise Agents page, expand the row of the agent requiring replacement, and click Add agent to cluster. More information about clusters can be found in Working with Enterprise Agent Clusters.

   

   Name the new cluster.

   
2. Disable the new cluster.

   Disabling the cluster will prevent overages for additional agents or errors for exceeding your contracted number of concurrent agents.

   
3. Create the new agent.

   Links to the most common deployment options are below.

   • Re-Initializing an Enterprise Agent (This will wipe an existing agent's settings and cause it to appear as a new agent)

   • How to Set Up the Virtual Appliance

   • Enterprise Agent Deployment Using Linux Package Method

   • Enterprise Agent Deployment Using Docker

4. Add the new agent to the cluster.

   Expand the row belonging to the new agent, and click Add agent to cluster.

   

   When the Add Agent to Cluster window appears, click Add to existing cluster, then select the name of the cluster in the drop-down box.

   
5. Delete the old agent.

   

   Confirm deletion.

   
6. Enable the new cluster (1) or convert the cluster back into an agent (2)

   

Related Information

Consult How to Plan for Enterprise Agent Upgrades for more information regarding Enterprise Agent upgrades and available upgrade methods.

If you have questions, contact the ThousandEyes Customer Engineering team.