Watchdog process on Endpoint Agent

Products

• Data Loss Prevention Endpoint Prevent
• Data Loss Prevention

Issue/Introduction

What is the wdp process on my Endpoint Agent?

Resolution

What is Watchdog?
Watchdog is a small external process (wdp.exe) that continuously monitors the Agent process i.e. edpa.exe. It is installed as a service and will show up as wdp in service control manager and on disk it can be located under the agent installed folder.

How Watchdog works?
Both Watchdog and Endpoint Agent communicates using Interprocess Communication (IPC) mechanism to keep an eye on each other. There is a periodic "heartbeat" message sent between the two to indicate that the process is alive. If for some reason one of the process fails to send the "heartbeat" message in the specified time interval then the other process would attempt to restart it. e.g. If edpa hasn't sent its "heartbeat" message to watchdog in a specified time interval then Watchdog will attempt to restart the edpa process and vice-versa.
This protects the endpoint agent from being stopped by a malicious user. If for some reason you would like to stop both the Agent and Watchdog processes then use the service shutdown tool, located in the Endpoint Tools .zip that comes in the agent download .zip, to stop them gracefully.