NS Event Queues full and Inventory agent unable to post inventory to NS via http

Products

• IT Management Suite
• Inventory Solution

Issue/Introduction

Clients running Inventory Solution for Windows do not appear to have any inventory reported when checking under Resource Manager or running reports from the NS console. The only inventory information shown is the basic inventory.

Symptoms:

• In the Altiris Agent logs I see errors when the agent attempts to post data to the NS such as:

  PostFile to 'HTTP://<NSServerName>/ALTIRIS/NS/Agent/PostEvent.asp' failed: HTTP error: 503 Service overloaded (-2147213300)

• In the logs on the Notification Server, I see errors such as:

  NS Event Queue (EvtQFast) is full—returning BUSY

• The aexsvc.exe process on the NS will be utilizing a substantial amount of CPU.

Cause

The inventory was unable to be posted to the NS as the event queues were full, preventing the processing of any events and often leading to the hanging of the Altiris Client Message Dispatcher service. IIS error 503 indicates that the server is too busy to handle any new requests.

Resolution

The following was used to resolve the performance issues:

1. On your NS navigate to Configuration > Server Settings > Notification Server Settings > Error Logging. Ensure that Trace logging is unchecked.
2. Check and modify the following settings in your Coresettings.config file:
   1. On your NS navigate to the following directory <installpath>\Program Files\Altiris\Notification Server\Config\ and copy and paste the Coresettings.config file somewhere safe (as a backup).
   2. Now open it in Notepad (<installpath>\Program Files\Altiris\Notification Server\Config\Coresettings.config) and do a search for the following two entries:
      
      <customSetting key="MaxConcurrentFastMsgs" type="local" value="10" />
      
      AND
      
      <customSetting key="MaxConcurrentSlowMsgs" type="local" value="3" />
      
      and modify the settings here as per the below information:
      
      For the Evtqfast (MaxconcurrentFastMsgs), the value should be changed to 5.
      For the Evtqueue (MaxConcurrentSlowMsgs), the value should be changed to 2.
      
      Note! The settings listed above are case sensitive. Do not change the existing case formatting when changing the values.
      
   3. Restart the Altiris Service and Client Message Dispatcher.
      
      Take a moment to review some of the files sitting in the queues (waiting to be processed by the NS). The 503 error may be the result of a policy that is running too frequently on the Altiris Agents. The agents may be sending more .NSE files than the Notification Server is able to handle in a short period of time. 

Applies To
Notification Server 6.0 SP2 Hotfix19

This could apply to any particular Altiris environmental variables. The NS was hosted on a dual processor system also hosting the SQL server.