Persistent Connection Requirements

You can send commands to the Windows Agent to perform actions outside of its schedule—to run an action now in near real-time. For example, when you want to reboot a device, rerun Checks, or install patches.

The Windows Agent uses a persistent outbound connection to our central servers to perform these near real-time actions from the All Devices view. If the Agent cannot reach the persistent connection servers, the Agent reverts to the standard communication model.

The persistent connection mechanism does not affect the Agent Check cycle, which continues to run on its existing schedule.

Required access to central servers: master and node addresses

The persistent connection connects over HTTPS to a regional central server. First, the Agent connects to the master server for its territory, and then the address for one of its nodes is provided. The following table shows the format for the master server and node addresses:

Type Address format
Master server region-master.rbm.system-monitor.com
Node region-node-Version-NodeNumber.rbm.system-monitor.com

If the connection to the node fails, the master server is queried again for an alternative node address and, if the connection to the alternative node fails, the Agent retries the process at the next 24x7 upload cycle.

If a firewall restricts outbound HTTPS connections, you may need to allow access to the following Master server and Node addresses to run near real-time commands:

Region Territory Master server address Node address
APAC Asia, Australia anz-master.rbm.system-monitor.com anz-node-Version-NodeNumber.rbm.system-monitor.com
Europe Europe, France, France1, Germany, Ireland, Poland, United Kingdom emea-master.rbm.system-monitor.com emea-node-Version-NodeNumber.rbm.system-monitor.com
United States, Americas United States, Americas us-master.rbm.system-monitor.com us-node-Version-NodeNumber.rbm.system-monitor.com

To ensure optimum performance, if the firewall supports Deep Packet Inspection we recommend you add an access rule for our URLs.

Connection Troubleshooting

If the Agent cannot connect to the master server, it is reported in debugrbm.log found in the Advanced Monitoring Agent installation folder (by default C:\Program Files (x86)\Advanced Monitoring Agent). For example:

dd-mm-yyyy hh:mm:ss: winagent(3564): CRBMConnectionManager::queryMasterServerForNodeServerDetails: error getting RBM Node Server details from master server

dd-mm-yyyy hh:mm:ss: winagent(3564): CRBMConnectionManager::runConnectorLoop: unable to retrieve node details from master server

To verify this error:

  1. Log into the computer using the same user account as the Advanced Monitoring Agent Service
  2. Open a browser
  3. Attempt to navigate to the master server URL references in debugrbm.log
    • Success: the browser returns a blank page
    • Failure: the browser returns an error message

Other required network connections: