Management Profile with IIS and SQL Blueprints taking more time

Products

• CA Configuration Automation

Issue/Introduction

Here the Agent Priority option which is set in the discovery options plays a role.

The CA Configuration Automation Agent searches the server file system for matches, there are five levels 
to set the priority.

Highest (fastest): The CA Configuration Automation Agent is unrestricted. Generally, this priority has a brief, 
but typically acceptable impact on the target server activity and can be used in most circumstances.
This is the default setting.

High, Medium, Low: Each lower priority reduces the impact on file system activity by approximately 20 %.

Lowest (slowest): The search yields to other processes. This results in a discovery that has almost no impact 
on the file system activity, but discoveries take substantially longer to complete.

Environment

CA Configuration Automation - All versions

Resolution

In this case it was set Agent Priority to Low, where it received less CPU time, which may slow its execution and 
increase the time it takes to complete tasks. For any discovery operations it is recommended to set Highest.

Here is brief about how blueprint discovery works:

1. To identify any component on target servers, it depends on Indicators. There are two indicators one is File 
and other one is Registry Indicators.

2. If the indicator is found then it will check for version match, if both are matching it will start identifying the 
component File Management, Parameters and soon.

3. Here Search From and Search Depth play a role in blueprint discovery operation.

4. When multiple blueprints are added to the management profile, it will union all the Search Depth of blueprints 
registry indicators.

5. For example, 

Microsoft SQL 2019 Server Instances has Search From: 

\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server and Search Depth : 5

                
Microsoft Internet Information Server has Search From: 

\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft and Search Depth : 1

It will union both Search Depth and it will set CCAgtRegistry::find(), depth = <5>. Based on the depth it starts looking 
up the registry entries. So that is the reason you observe in agent log it is showing multiple registry entries.

This is how blueprint discovery works.

 

Example of a Management Profile after changing the priority from Low to Highest:

	Low	Highest
Only IIS	39 secs	36 secs
Only SQL	229 secs	65 secs
Both	~ 1h30mins /w timeout in 30mins	96 secs

 

Additional Information

Another question about 30-minute time limit not respected :

Discovery Time Limit is set to the CCA server, when it reaches the time limit, it immediately stops the discovery 
from the server, but at the agent side the request will continue till the api call gets completed.

Since the agent priority was set to low which takes discoveries longer to complete during this process agent will 
retry and it also looks for previously discovered components all this logging was adding to the agent log.
It is recommended to set the agent priority to Highest for optimal discovery operation.