I'm sharing a bit of tidbit about Agent status, specifically for Primary servers and Satellite servers.

I've seen several times how servers fail health checks or other services just simply because DNS is not configured correctly on the local device. DNS can be working correctly on the network, but if the server isn't configured correctly it will fail.

Let's start off by looking at a primary server that has a yellow agent status icon. (Normally it is a pleasant happy green icon).

* Mouse over the agent status icon.

The expected address of the server is displayed when the cursor passes over the agent status icon. This is the first place that you can detect if DNS is configured correctly for the server.

* zcc.log

Another excellent place is the zcc.log stored on the primary server. You will have to open notepad or get a copy of ZEDCM to view the log. You will find entries in the ZCC.log as the following:

17 Dec 2011 16:54:58 DeviceDetailsGener..890 :Sending AJAX request to '172.16.245.128' (WIN-PBI7O2X3W2H.localdomain)
17 Dec 2011 16:54:59 DeviceHealthDescri..189 :Running AJAX ping for url: http://WIN-PBI7O2X3W2H.localdomain:7628/RURunning
17 Dec 2011 16:54:59 DeviceHealthDescrip..93 :Unable to ping dns WIN-PBI7O2X3W2H.localdomain on port 7628, message: WIN-PBI7O2X3W2H.localdomain
17 Dec 2011 16:54:59 DeviceHealthDescri..189 :Running AJAX ping for url: http://172.16.245.128:7628/RURunning
17 Dec 2011 16:54:59 DeviceHealthDescri..118 :Ping of 172.16.245.128 was successful.

From this log entry you can see that the server is trying an AJAX request (status request), but this is failing. ("Unable to ping DNS"). At this point it should be obvious what the problem is. Notice the domain name after the DNS name of the server. This full address isn't resolvable by the server or the browser from which you are running the ZENworks Admin Console from. In either case you must add that entry to DNS.

**TIP
A very important tip to remember when installing the primary server or a Satellite server is the Primary DNS configuration. This is configurable under Computer Properties, not under the normal Network Configurations options for the NIC.

See:

1. Unable to remote control devices by DNS address

• Invalid self signed certificate will cause Authentication Satellite to be ignored