How often will the Altiris Agent retry communications?

Products

• IT Management Suite

Issue/Introduction

 

Resolution

Question
What does the agent do if it fails to download a package, send an event, send basic inventory or fails to get its configuration? And when or how often does the agent retry these communications?

Answer

The agent continues to try all of these basic tasks. The real questions are when and how often the retries occur.

The agent does a progressive back off which begins with a seed period of time; in all cases, this period of time is continually doubled up until a max interval is reached.

Both the seed intervals and the max intervals are defined in the registry and defaults for all intervals are three minutes.

Here are the registry details:

Request type	Initial value	Max value
Configuration Requests	[...] Altiris Agent\Servers\<Server Name>\Policy Retry Interval (mins)	[...] Altiris Agent\Servers\<Server Name>\Policy Update Interval (mins)
Basic Inventory	[...] Altiris Agent\Servers\<Server Name>\Basic Inventory Retry Interval (mins)	[...] Altiris Agent\Servers\<Server Name>\Basic Inventory Update Interval (mins)
Package Delivery	[...] Communications\Package Delivery\Retry delay (mins)	[...] Communications\Package Delivery\Maximum retry delay (mins)
Agent Transport	[...] Altiris Agent\Servers\<Server Name>\Transport Retry Interval (mins)	[...] Altiris Agent\Servers\<Server Name>\Transport Maximum Retry Interval (mins)

[...] = 'HKey_Local_Machine\Software\Altiris\'