Upgrade a Windows agent

N-able N-central intelligently manages the Windows agents by queuing the upgrades. This caching behavior reduces the impact on network resources by only downloading the upgrade software once from your N-able N-central server rather than having each Windows agent individually download the upgrade software.

The N-able N-central server performs a maximum of 15 upgrades at one time to minimize the demand on network resources. If you configure to upgrade both Windows agents and probes, N-able N-central will upgrade the probes first, because they are responsible for monitoring multiple devices.

If an upgrade fails, N-able N-central will retry after 30 minutes, regardless of priority. This also presumes that the device is online to receive the upgrade. The agent tries to obtain its upgrade software from the Windows probe on the LAN. If the agent is unable to connect to a Windows probe, it will attempt to obtain the upgrade software from the N-able N-central server.

If N-able N-central discovers that an older release of agent has been installed, agent will automatically upgrade to the current version. Older versions of agent will not communicate properly with the current release of N-able N-central. This is useful when a restored image of a device is used due to a hard disk failure or infection, and an older version of agent is on the image. Setting the agent upgrade setting to Never will be ignored.

  1. Click Views > All Devices.
  2. Select the check box beside the name of each of the devices you want to upgrade.
  3. Click Update Monitoring Software.

  4. For the Upgrade Agent drop-down list box, select Now to update to the latest version, or click Always to automatically update the agent when a new version becomes available.

  5. Click Save.

N-able N-central downloads the latest agent software when available and installs it on the configured servers.3