Westyy,


Occasionally I will see this in the event that a machine is in a group that is telling it to look for a WSUS server. Either ‘Keep device settings’ or ‘use a WSUS server’ are the selected options in the ‘Edit Group’ page. Verify what you see in there and set it to ‘Windows Update’ to rule that out as a potential issue.


Regards,

Thanks Mark, I’ll give it a shot. 🙂

Same here - over the last six months or so Automox has lost the ability to accurately detect if a device is online or not. I did wonder if Automox would scale as it became more popular, it seems to be suffering the same fate as many products - works great to start with, then as more features are added the core functionality starts to fail. Personally, I am fed up seeing devices on line that I know are locked away or even devices that show as ‘connected’ with a filter search, but show as disconnected in device details. Support can help to some extent, but there is an issue that needs to be resolved properly.

Is seems fairly safe to assume that if an agent doesn’t call home for x number of hours, it is offline. I have had devices offline for months that appeared to be updating.

Hi David,


This is actually because of a bug inside of the Automox agent that we are working on. The agent itself does a heartbeat once an hour to confirm it is still online. The issue with the inaccurate online status is something that affects that to an extent. We do hope to have this corrected in the very near future but I do not have an ETA on when it will be in.

Hi Brandon,


This isn’t just a problem since agent 29 was introduced - older agents have the same problem. I know this because despite support looking at it, agents are not getting automatically updated.

Hopefully this can get resolved before my renewal date.

Completely understand and yeah, this is related to the backend and not the agents. I do want to apologize for the inconvenience you are experiencing as I know how frustrating that is to have a system show the improper connection state.

Hi @Westyy. We have released a couple fixes recently that have removed most of the causes that can put a device in a state where the status no longer updates. Unfortunately it’s a problem that can have several causes and will need more work on our part. We have assigned several members of our engineering team to fix this issue and have an escalation ticket open on it currently that I’m keeping heat on.

On to what you can do. Unfortunately there isn’t something that can be done fix it on your end. The device is still performing all it’s functions on the back end such as patching and scanning but you’re not going to see the status updating. In support we can help get these running for you. Just email us (or use the chat in console) with the subject line stuck commands or something similar and we will jump on the ticket.

A way to determine if a device has a stuck status is to select all the machines you suspect and run a manual scan. If the status doesn’t change within say a minute please send us those devices. If possible keep those same machines selected and export the list then send us that file. That will make things much quicker on our end and we should be able to get you up and running.

Hey Jason,

Thanks for the response; much appreciated. 🙂


I’ll review our list and see if I have a list of agents to send through. The device I’m working on hasn’t updated nor does it look like anything is queuing from what I can see. I’ll email support and we can go from there. Everything else is gucci though.

Thank you,

Westyy

Another example - a pc that had not been turned on for four months. It was running agent 28 and Windows 10 1903. In the console, it was showing offline with a couple of of updates pending. As it was local, I turned the pc on and the console showed it as online and scanning for updates.

So far so good, but after an hour or so the status had not changed. I knew it should find at least 30 updates, so I waited a while longer. Eventually, as a test, I clicked the reboot button on the console and nothing happened. So, I went back upstairs, manually updated the pc using ‘check for updates’, the pc updated all the way to Win 10 2004, the console changed to ‘compliant’ and still showing agent 28.

It was convenient that the pc was upstairs and not 150 miles away, but in this scenario, what is the point of having Automox installed?

The issues you’re seeing are because of the outage we’re currently experiencing:


https://status.automox.com/


Once we get that resolved you shouldn’t see this sort of delay or behavior. Sorry for the inconvenience in the meantime!

To add to what Nicc just said, if you are seeing this currently this is very likely because of the outage we had yesterday. Currently Automox is functional and able to patch but there is likely a few systems in your organization that are showing scanning status or disconnected/connected when they are incorrect. We are currently cleaning all of these status’s up on our end. The process will take a few hours to complete but we will get these all set and in a good state soon.

I recall a good while back that a banner was placed on the dashboard to advise on a critical patch.


Seems like it would be a good idea to put a message there if you are having problems.

I appreciate there is a significant time difference where I am, but this did result in wasting most of a working day. I would have manually updated a group of pcs if I had known.

Good suggestion, although if the console itself is having issues then you won’t even get to the banner. We do have a status site that you can subscribe to so that you can get email notifications:


https://status.automox.com/


That way the console doesn’t have to be up for you to get information.