Important Considerations and Planning for WhatsUp Gold Agent Deployment and Usage

About the Agent

The Agent is a lightweight application WhatsUp Gold can distribute to devices on your network. First and foremost, it is important to note this is an optional feature. Currently, because the Agent solely supports Log Management, if your license does not include this feature, you do not need to deploy Agents on your network. If you do plan to use Agents with Log Management, please ensure no organizational policies exist which do not allow for this type of deployment. In the event you are unable to deploy Agents, you can still take advantage of Log Management features using the centralized log collector.

The Agent can be deployed automatically using the Agent deployment manager or manually using a .zip install package depending on your preference and network configuration. It utilizes an encrypted communications channel based on gRPC and HTTP/2 to communicate back to WhatsUp Gold. This encrypted channel ensures the Agent is able to connect back to the parent WhatsUp Gold server from which it was deployed and blocks any attempts to intercept the connection. Each Agent is given a unique ID (AgentID) which is used for identifying itself to WhatsUp Gold whenever a given request or response is issued. Accordingly, the dedicated Agent service provides it with data applicable to the configuration settings for that device.

Unique System Requirements

WhatsUp Gold Agent implementation currently only supports Windows operating systems. As such, only Windows Event Log configuration can be managed at this time. Additionally, the operating system installed must be 64-bit; 32-bit (x86) Windows operating systems are not supported. For additional system requirements, please see the latest WhatsUp Gold Release Notes.

Planning for using the Agent

In contrast to WhatsUp Gold which initiates a connection to acquire information about devices on your network, and therefore is attempting to reach the device it is trying to monitor, the Agent reverses the approach by initiating the connection and sending data to the WhatsUp Gold server. (For comparison, this is similar to WhatsUp Gold Remote environments in which the remote WhatsUp Gold installation needs to be able to communicate information back to the central WhatsUp Gold server.)

The Agent system uses TCP port 9749 by default. If you have firewalls filtering traffic on your network, an exemption for this port may be necessary. Alternately, users with administrator privileges can change the port using the Agent General Settings dialog. For additional information on port number, see Configuring WhatsUp Gold Agent General Settings.

The Agent requires full TLS/SSL trust. Certificate errors are not and cannot be ignored. The intent is to protect the privileged data the WhatsUp Gold server returns to the Agent. The Agent service auto-generates a set of certificates for use with the Agent, upon initial startup. If the default settings are not appropriate, the WhatsUp Gold administrator can regenerate a new set of certificates. For additional information on certificates, see Configuring WhatsUp Gold Agent General Settings.

Important: If Agent General Settings are changed or if certificates are regenerated, this triggers a re-deployment to all of the Agents currently deployed since their settings are no longer valid and they will no longer be able to connect to WhatsUp Gold.