The Windows agent service enables the Windows agent to interact with the local computer and endpoints managed by proxy, as well as communicate with Core Services. During local and remote installation, the installation program modifies the following properties for the Windows agent service:
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Log on as a service |
Grants the “Log on as a service” permission to the Windows agent service account for the local computer |
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Recovery from failure |
Changes the automatic recovery settings for First failure and Second failure to Restart the Service |
The account for the Windows agent service must have the “Log on as a service” permission to perform queries on the local and proxied agent computers. During agent installation and deployment, you can specify whether the service account logs on as a LocalSystem account or uses a different Windows account. The installation and deployment programs automatically grant the specified account the “Log on as a service” permission to the local computer.
After installation or remote deployment, if you change the service account to a local account from a domain account, or vice versa, the Windows agent service might not restart on systems where the new account does not have the required permission by default. For more information about permissions for the Windows agent service, see Section 2.4.5, Permissions Requirements.
When you specify a Deployment Agent for deployment, the service account on the Deployment Agent must have Administrator permissions for the computers targeted for new agent installation or updates. For more information, see Section 2.1.2, Installing or Updating Agents on Remote Computers.
To ensure that the Services utility in the Windows Control Panel automatically restarts the Windows agent service after a failure, the agent installation program modifies the automatic recovery settings for the service. The modifications instruct Windows Services to make two attempts at restarting the agent service. By default, each restart attempt occurs one minute after the service failure. The installation program also instructs the Services utility to reset the failure count every 15 minutes. You can change these settings in the Properties window for the Windows agent service.
NOTE:
Although the installation and deployment program specifies a value of 15 minutes for the Reset fail count after setting, the Recovery tab on the Properties window for the Windows agent service displays 0 for the setting. This discrepancy occurs because the Properties window allows users to specify values only in increments of days.
As a best practice, avoid enabling the Services utility to attempt restarts after two failures. Multiple restart attempts can prevent Windows from reporting essential error messages.