Why Does The "Agent Version" Field Have Data, Despite Not Having the CloudHealth Agent Installed?

Products

• CloudHealth

Issue/Introduction

The “Agent” field doesn’t necessarily refer to the CloudHealth agent.

With Azure VMs (Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD), there’s an agent called “Microsoft Azure Linux/Windows Agent” (waagent) that manages the provisioning, and VM interaction with the Azure Fabric Controller. 

The VM Agent has a primary role in enabling and executing Azure virtual machine extensions. 

VM Extensions enable post-deployment configuration of VM, such as installing and configuring software and also enable recovery features such as resetting the administrative password of a VM.  Without the Azure VM Agent, VM extensions cannot be run.  More information about that here and here. 

This agent usually gets picked up by us and put in the "agent" field.  Therefore, the “Agent” field doesn’t necessarily refer to the CloudHealth agent.

Version numbers can be found in Microsoft Azure's GitHub; for example, Linux Agent 2.3.1.1's version can be found here: https://github.com/Azure/WALinuxAgent/releases/tag/pre-v2.3.1.1.

You can also confirm the agent version by using the command waagent --version on the machine to see if the version matches CloudHealth.

 

Below are examples of how agent details are visually represented within CloudHealth: