Agent Auto Update

Now that we have introduced HA capabilities to RHQ, we expect to be able to support at least a few hundred agents within an RHQ ecosystem (if not more).

But this poses a new challenge for us and our customers - how do we keep all of those agents up-to-date? Once you get an RHQ environment set up and running, what happens when we release our next version of RHQ? We want to avoid having to remotely log onto each and every agent machine to manually update their old agents.

I've recently embarked on the first implementation of an "agent auto-update" feature, to be included in the next release of RHQ.

Soon, RHQ will no longer ship a separate agent distribution. We will now ship just a "RHQ distribution" that includes both a server and agent (this will be true of Jopr and JBoss ON as well). This will ensure that when you get a distribution binary, you will receive the server and agent that are compatible with each other.

The agent distribution is then directly downloadable straight from the server (e.g. http://<server>:7080/agentupdate/download). This lets you grab an agent distribution when you want to install an agent manually.

However, what happens if you already installed the agent? Soon, what will happen, is the agent will be able to automatically download an updated agent distribution from the server and install the update itself; all without user intervention or manual steps needing to be taken.

To follow the progress of this feature or are interested in the technical details, watch the JIRA and feel free to join in the discussion on that developer forum thread.

http://jira.rhq-project.org/browse/RHQ-110
http://www.rhq-project.org/display/RHQ/Design-AgentAutoUpdate