The number of licenses corresponds to the number of “enabled” agents.
An agent has 3 primary states:
- unregistered or registered
- enabled or disabled
- active or inactive
When an agent is first created via the Firebind web console, it is put into an unregistered state. Once the agent is deployed and starts for the first time, the agent enters a registered state and stays registered until it is deleted.
Upon registration, the agent is automatically enabled and will begin testing according to its scheduled interval (e.g. every 5 minutes.) The one exception to this is that if a user account already has the maximum number of agents enabled, the new agent will register and be left in a disabled state.
For every enabled agent license, Firebind permits 2 agents to be created. For example, if a user had a license for 5 agents, a total of 10 agents could be created, however only 5 of the 10 could be in an enabled (testing) state at any given time. If agents 1 through 5 were enabled, then the user could, for example, disable agent 3 and then enable agent 7, leaving the user with agents 1,2,4,5 and 7 in an enabled state.
All agents will “check-in” (poll) the Firebind web console every 10 seconds. If the console hasn’t received an agent poll within 30 seconds, it will declare the agent inactive. The most common reasons for inactivity are [1] the remote site where the agent is deployed is experiencing connectivity issues or [2] the host machine where the agent is deployed was no longer online (due to manual shutdown, inactivity timeout, sleep mode, etc.)
When an agent is created, Firebind automatically assigns an Agent ID. This Agent ID uniquely identifies each agent and it is the single configuration parameter that needs to be supplied during the agent installation process.
Agents are not required to remain assigned to a single machine or location. For example, a customer with a single agent license could deploy that agent to one site in the morning, another site in the afternoon, and yet a third site in the evening. The only requirement would be that the same agent ID couldn’t be actively used from more than a single site at any given time.