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Multiple Network Nodes Visible For Same Machine

Kumar Ghosh
  • Updated

Overview

Depending on how the Agent and any instrumented containers are configured on a system, after running the product for a while multiple network nodes appear for the same machine. Traffic, however, is only shown on one of the instrumented nodes.

 

Solution

If an agent is started while the OS switches between a VPN, you may end up with 2 nodes and traffic might not be shown on the desired node. Similarly for the instrumented systems, only one of them will show traffic.

This issue is fixed in 12.0/2021 R1 and later. You can request the installers by following this KB article.

After the upgrade, it is required to generate a UUID (Universally Unique ID) and give it to the interceptor SDK and Agent, making sure that the UUID is the same for the interceptors and Agent sharing the same OS. This will represent applications on one machine as one node. Consequently, if multiple Agents/interceptors have the same ID across machines, then they will be represented as a single node. An example of a UUID would be a pseudo-random alphanumeric sequence or even a crafted string unique in the network such as device01, machineA, etc.

  • To set the UUID, for Java (for the Java interceptor SDK and the Agent), this will be done by using the system property actional.agent.nodeid while for the .NET interceptor SDK & Agent, it will be done by defining the setting actional.agent.nodeid in machine.config.
  • Please note that if you run the Agent or the instrumented container as the System user on Windows, the operating system ID might be retrieved by the Agent/interceptor leading to the same node being represented with duplicates and traffic not shown on the desired nodes.
  • Lastly, there is an additional property/setting called actional.agent.nodename which defines the default nodename that is reported.

 

Testing

After the upgrades and the mentioned property is set, the nodes shouldn't have duplicate representations and the traffic should be represented as desired.