Cloning machines can cause duplicate agents.

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Cloning machines can cause duplicate agents.

I have seen quite a number of issues recently where there has been issues of disconnects or performance issues with the HUB, RTEMS and the TEPS which have been caused by agents being cloned with the same hostname for the agent.

Cloned agents can cause slow downs or crashes especially on the TEPS, as the agent name is constantly being updated with a new ip address.

If you have this issue you will often see the navigator view reporting "Navigator Updates Pending"

It can be common to clone machines with an ITM agent already set up on them, however care should be made about what is set as the CTIRA_HOSTNAME in the config file of the agent and how ip address and hostname are managed for the cloned agents.

Unfortunately it is difficult for us to identify the location of these agents for you once they have been created.
Therefore it can be up to the team that has created the agents to then work through what they know has been set up and the correct configuration set on each agent.

As well as the symptoms above there is also a tool called available called the Database Health Checker.

Details located here:

https://itm-sitworld.blog/2015/03/24/sitworld-itm-database-health-checker/

This gives a lot of information about the ITM environment as well as the information of any agent that  has registered more than once and this information gives an indication of duplicate agents.

For example: the report gives a number of times an agent has been registered:

90,DATAHEALTH1068E,fred_agent3:NT,Agent registering 125 times: possible duplicate agent names,,,,,

In this case the NT agent fred_agent3 has registered 125 times, which is high so this needs to be investigated.

The above link gives all the details on how to download and run this tool, otherwise opening a Case and sending a HUB pdcollect that includes the EIB files; will mean Support can check the environment.

However it is much better not to have these issues in the first place, so check the clone work that is to be done, and make sure hostnames/agent names are not being copied!