Probe troubleshooting

Probes in a status other than Normal will result in further misconfigured or stale services, failed patch management and agent deployment as well as many other issues. The first thing to check is that the probe is running.

  1. At the Service Organization level
  2. Expand Administrationin the left navigation pane.
  3. Click Probes.
  4. Locate the problem probe and ensure the Windows Software Probe service is installed and running. It may need to be restarted.

N-able N-central probes require .NET version 4.5.2. If .NET fails, the probe service may also fail.

Reset the password and account

As outlined in the topic Create a probe administrator account, we recommend creating a Domain Administrator account for the probe to use, with a complex non-expiring password. If the password expires, or an upgrade does fails to complete, the probe will fail due to credential issues.

Resetting the password and account does not affect the credentials the probe uses to perform tasks, such as discovery jobs. Although our suggested best practice is to reinstall the probe using the new correct credentials to ensure they are always current and mitigate any potential issues.

  1. Log on to the server or device that hosts your probe.
  2. Run the Windows application services.msc on the probe device to view system services.
  3. Stop the following probe services:
  • Windows Software Probe Maintenance service
  • Windows Software Probe service
  • Windows Software Probe Syslog service
  1. Right-click the Windows Software Probe service.
  2. Click the Log On tab.
  3. Enter the new Domain Administrator credentials.
  4. Click Apply.
  5. Click the General tab and in the Start parameters field enter:

    6. username=yourDomain\User password=Yourpa$$word

  6. Click Start.
  7. Re-start the other Windows software probe services.

Reinstall the probe

To reinstall the probe, manually place the appropriate customer-specific version on the customer's server. The first time you launch the installer it will remove the existing probe.

You will need to run it a second time to install a new probe service.

Install the probe on a different system

If you choose to install the probe on a different system, do not delete the existing probe until you have performed a task transfer.

This is covered in the section Transfer tasks from one probe to another.

If these options do not resolve your issues, contact N-able technical support.