Troubleshooting Auto Upgrade feature

Products

• CA Client Automation - IT Client Manager
• CA Client Automation

Issue/Introduction

After enabling ITCM agent auto upgrade via configuration policy, agents in the environment are still not upgrading.

Environment

Client Automation - All versions post 14 SP1

Resolution

Agent auto-upgrade is a function of Software Delivery in ITCM.  After being enabled by configuration policy, it is the responsibility of the sd_server plugin on the scalability server to validate and perform auto-upgrade activities.  By default, the SD agent will send a list of installed software, on every 10th SD job check.  When it does, the sd_server plugin on the scalabiltiy server will evaluate it for automatic agent upgrade.  This document covers several possible scenarios for why the auto upgrade functionality may not be working as expected.

Note: When checking configuration policy values, if not using the Default Computer Policy (which applies to all servers and endpoints), be mindful of where your configuration policy is applied (or not applied).  It may be simply the case you used a non-default configuration policy, but forgot to apply it to the relevant scalability servers or agents in the environment.

1- Ensure the scalability server-side policy is set to enable agent auto-upgrade functionality:
Default Computer Policy --> DSM --> Software Delivery --> Scalability Server --> Agent Auto Upgrade: Agent auto upgrade mode [TRUE]

2-Ensure the agent-side policy is set to enable agent auto-upgrade functionality:
Default Computer Policy --> DSM --> Software Delivery --> Agent --> Agent Auto Upgrade: Enable auto upgrade [TRUE]

3- Ensure the scalability server-side policy accounts for the ITCM agent versions in your environment.  Agent versions 12.9.0.1001 and 14.0.1000.194 may not be included in the out of the box policy:
Default Computer Policy --> DSM --> Software Delivery --> Scalability Server --> Agent Auto Upgrade: Agent versions allowed for upgrade

Check to ensure the version list includes all ITCM versions you expect to be upgraded automatically:
12.8.0.690;12.8.1.110;12.9.0.338;12.9.0.1001;12.9.1.70;12.9.2.14;14.0.0.199;14.0.1000.194

4- Ensure each of the individual DSM Agent plugin packages are staged on the Scalability Server.  Unfortunately the auto-upgrade does not use the combined agent packages for auto-upgrades, even if your endpoints have all plugins installed.

5- Auto-upgrade is sensitive to ENU (English only) vs NLS (non-language specific) agent variants.  Ensure the proper or BOTH sets of agent plugins are available in the SS staging library:

Additional Information

If none of the above suggestions resolves the problem with agent auto-upgrade, please open a support case.

In order to properly debug, DETAIL level traces will be required of the sd_server process:
cftrace -c set -l detail -s 50000 -ln 4 -f usd -pp sdserver

Once detail traces are set on the scalability server, run a caf register on an agent that is not auto-upgrading, and make a note of the agent name when uploading logs to the case.