[OpsMgr 2007 R2][OpsMgr 2012] Troubleshooting gray agent states in System Center Operations Manager

This article describes how to troubleshoot problems in which an agent, a management server, or a gateway is unavailable or "grayed out" in System Center Operations Manager.

An agent, a management server, or a gateway can have one of the following states, as indicated by the color of the agent name and icon in the Monitoring pane.

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State	Appearance	Description
Healthy		The agent or management server is running normally.
Critical		There is a problem on the agent or management server.
Unknown	Gray agent name,	The health service watcher on the root management server (RMS) that is watching the health service on the monitored computer is no longer receiving heartbeats from the agent. The health service watcher had been receiving heartbeats previously, and the health service was reported as healthy). This also means that the management servers are no longer receiving any information from the agent. This issue may occur because the computer that is running the agent is not running or there are connectivity issues. You can find more information about the Health Service Watcher view.
Unknown		The status of the discovered item is unknown. There is no monitor available for this specific discovered item.

Causes of a gray state

An agent, a management server, or a gateway may become unavailable for any of the following reasons:

• Heartbeat failure
• Invalid configuration
• System workflows failure
• OpsMgr Database or data warehouse performance issues
• RMS or primary MS or gateway performance issues
• Network or authentication issues
• Health service issues (service is not running)

Issue scope

Before you begin to troubleshoot the agent "grayed out" issue, you should first understand the Operations Manager topology, and then define the scope of the issue. The following questions may help you to define the scope of the issue:

• How many agents are affected?
• Are the agents experiencing the issue in the same network segment?
• Do the agents report to the same management server?
• How often do the agents enter and remain in a gray state?
• How do you typically recover from this situation (for example, restart the agent health service, clear the cache, rely upon automatic recovery)?
• Are the Heartbeat failure alerts generated for these agents?
• Does this issue occur during a specific time of the day?
• Does this issue persist if you failover these agents to another management server or gateway?
• When did this problem start?
• Were any changes made to the agents, the management servers, or the gateway or management group?
• Are the affected agents Windows clustered systems?
• Is the Health Service State folder excluded from antivirus scanning?
• What is the environment this is occurring in OpsMgr SP1, R2, 2012?

Troubleshooting strategy

Your troubleshooting strategy will be dictated by which component is inactive, where that component falls within the topology, and how widespread the problem is. Consider the following conditions:

• If the agents that report to a particular management server or gateway are unavailable, troubleshooting should start at the management server or gateway level.
• If the gateways that report to a particular management server are unavailable, troubleshooting should start at the management server level.
• For agentless systems, for Network devices, and for Unix/Linux servers, troubleshooting should start at the agent, management server, or gateway that is monitoring these objects.
• If all the systems are unavailable, troubleshooting should start at the root management server.
• Troubleshooting typically starts at the level immediately above the unavailable component.

Issue scenarios that are identified in the Microsoft Article. Read the article to have the resolution.

Scenario 1

Only a few agents are affected by the issue. These agents report to different management servers. Agents remain unavailable on a regular basis. Although you are able to clear the agent cache to help resolve the issue temporarily, the problem recurs after a few days.

Scenario 2

Only a few agents are affected by the issue. These agents report to different management servers. Agents remain inactive constantly. Although you are able to clear the agent cache, this does not reolve the issue.

Scenario 3

All the agents that report to a particular management server or gateway are unavailable.

Scenario 4

All the agents that report to a specific management server alternate intermittently between healthy and gray states.

Scenario 5

All the agents in the environment alternate intermittently between healthy and gray states.

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties.