Use the Replace Agent page to replace an offline agent with a new, unused agent. The unique hardware ID of the new agent replaces the offline agent's record in the Skybot Scheduler database and maintains the offline agent's history. This is helpful for moving a virtual server, a network card failure, or a port change.

Note: The old agent must be offline. The new agent must not be in use. If the replacing agent has already been assigned objects, such as Jobs, Agent Event Monitors, or Agent Groups, an error will occur.

  • Select the new agent from the drop-down menu.
  • Click Replace to replace the current agent

Replace Agent retains current jobs on the agent queue. Jobs will start immediately after you click Replace.

This will be similar to an agent switch, but internally, we are updating the “old” agent definition with the hardware information of a “new” agent. This is instead of the current agent switch, which updates all of the other objects (jobs, aems, agent group members, etc…) to reference the new agent definition by new OID.

The benefit is that the old Agent OID will be retained with the new agent definitions information, so the existing history for the agent will be maintained. That means any existing queued and missed jobs can easily run on the new hardware definition, since it will be using the old agent ID on the previous history records.

We are really just updating the internal hardware definition of the existing agent with the definition from a new agent, so when it re-connects, it will link the correct agent definition with the correct set of jobs. This process will also delete the “new” agent definition the final step.

This should also work if a user has to change the port of an existing agent. It currently results in a new agent definition as well. This new “replace” function can replace the old agent definition with the new agent definition.

The switch function will still remain because it allows the user to split out subsets of the jobs and Agent Event Monitor’s to multiple agents.