8.4. Configuration of AgentActions

Starting with SysOrb version 2.4, you can now define AgentActions, which is actions carried out on the Agent machine, when a user orders this through the Web Interface. These actions can help ease remote administration, as they can be defined to carry out common tasks on machines. An AgentAction could as an example restart a webserver, or reboot the target machine.

In order to use AgentActions you will first have to configure the Agent to read the actions from a configuration file. The name of this file is specified through the actions_conf option in the agent configuration (see Section 8.1 for information about how this is done).

The fileformat for the AgentAction configuration file resembles the fileformat of the Custom Check configuration file very much. The format consists of a block as following for each action:

# Comment lines begin with #
[action name]
command=/path/to/the/execfile parameters

The action name between the [ and ] is the name displayed to the user of the Web Interface. The command parameter is the command which is executed. On Unix-like systems this command is passed to the shell, so normal shell syntax can be used.

As an example, the following configuration file will create an action that will restart IIS on a Windows 2000 Server installation.

# Restart IIS.
[Restart IIS]
command=iisreset
        

Once the AgentAction configuration file is in place, you must rescan the agent before the actions appear in the Web Interface. When they appear, they will be accessible from the Node overview page, and from the AgentCheck configuration pages.