Why are Bamboo agents still marked online after stopping them?

[Charlie Misonne]

Here is something I've always wondered but never found an explanation for.

When stopping a Bamboo remote agent on the server the process properly stops.

systemctl stop bamboo_agent

However in Bamboo it will still be displayed under Online Remote Agents.

When starting the agent again the live logs display:

Jan 25, 2019 11:21:52 AM A remote agent is loading on agent.hostname.com (x.x.x.x).
Jan 25, 2019 11:22:05 AM Remote agent [agent.hostname.com] marked as inactive. A new one came in place.
Jan 25, 2019 11:22:05 AM Remote agent [agent.hostname.com] came back after a period of inactivity.

 For me it is very strange that Bamboo registers the same agent but says a new one came in place.

Am I doing something wrong for years now? Or is this just the way it works?

[Daniel Santos · Accepted solution]

Hi @Charlie Misonne,

Yes, that is how it works by design. Bamboo server has a 10min timeout to consider the agent offline. If the agent goes down and comes back online before that time, you will see the messages you shared. The new agent will be considered a new entry and the old one will become inactive right away. In the end, you will have the same agent online again.

[Charlie Misonne]

Hi Daniel

Ok that confirms what I assumed. It's not very intuitive though.

Thanks for your answer.

[Daniel Santos]

I've created this feature request to address this issue: [BAM-20275] Reduce the time taken to identify an agent is offline.
I suppose the error message would not be an issue if the agent state was updated faster. Let me know if you think we should adjust the feature request to better match your perception of this issue.

[Charlie Misonne]

Hi Daniel

Thanks for creating this feature request!

What I had in mind is: as soon as an agent is stopped manually this triggers Bamboo to know about it immediately. I'm wondering why this is time based.

Bamboo and the Bamboo Agents have a two way communication right? Or am I mistaken.

[Daniel Santos]

In fact, all communication is always started by the agents. The agent could inform Bamboo that it is shutting down itself, but we would still have the timeout for the cases when the process was killed not gracefully or crashed.

That feature request had the intention to reduce this time for all the cases, but I will add this gracefull stop suggestion also.

The Bamboo server does not scan for agents, it just waits for requests. The agents use dynamic ports which makes it easy to have multiple of them in the same server without dealing with ports configuration. It is also better on performance perspective if the server didn't have this task to check all the agents (that could be hundreds).

I hope that can clarify this scenario better.