Stopping an Agent¶

In certain situations, stopping a BizMetry agent for a given environment may be necessary. The most common reasons are:

Planned maintenance

When performing infrastructure maintenance on the host machine — such as OS updates, hardware changes, or network reconfiguration — the agent should be stopped cleanly before the intervention begins to avoid leaving it in an inconsistent state.

Environment decommissioning

If an environment is being decommissioned or temporarily taken out of service, stopping its associated agent ensures no metrics are captured or transmitted during the downtime period.

Troubleshooting

In some diagnostic scenarios, stopping the agent and restarting it fresh is part of a controlled troubleshooting procedure — for example, when investigating abnormal resource consumption or persistent connectivity issues.

Stop Procedure¶

An agent can be stopped from two different locations within BizMetry. Both lead to the same result — choose whichever is more convenient for your current context.

Option A — From the Profile Agent Tab¶

Navigate to the relevant profile card from the Home screen, open the secondary menu, and select Agents. In the Agents tab, locate the agent and click the stop icon on its card's action toolbar.

Option B — From the Main Agents Menu¶

From the Home screen, open the main menu and select Agents. Locate the agent in the global agent list and click the stop icon on its row.

Confirming the Stop¶

In both cases, BizMetry displays a confirmation modal before proceeding. This step exists to prevent accidental stops in production environments. Review the agent details shown in the modal and confirm to initiate the stop.

Stop Lifecycle¶

Once confirmed, BizMetry transitions the agent through the following sequence of states:

STOPPING → OFFLINE

Under normal conditions, the transition to OFFLINE completes within a few seconds to a couple of minutes depending on the agent's workload at the time of the request.

Impact on Datasources¶

Stopping an agent has cascading effects on all datasources associated with it. It is important to understand these impacts before performing a stop in a production environment.

Datasource Unavailability¶

All datasources linked to the stopped agent will transition to OFFLINE for the entire duration the agent remains stopped. During this window, the following operations are unavailable:

• Importing new resources into the profile from the affected datasource.
• Editing ASBO anchors for resource types that have an environment mapping associated with the affected datasource.
• Browsing resources for the environment linked to the datasource, including PK lookup for manual ASBO association.

These restrictions are automatically lifted once the agent is restarted and returns to ONLINE.

Notifications¶

BizMetry automatically generates notifications as the agent transitions through each state. These are visible in the Notifications panel, accessible from the main menu under Notifications. This allows operators to track the stop progress without having to actively monitor the agent card.

Telemetry Accumulation — Store and Forward (SAF)¶

This is the most operationally critical side effect of stopping an agent, and it requires careful attention.

While the agent is OFFLINE, telemetry metrics collected by BizMetry — whether from the API Gateway or from instrumented applications via the BizMetry SDK — are not discarded. Instead, they are buffered locally at the point of capture using a Store and Forward (SAF) mechanism. Once the agent returns to ONLINE, the buffered metrics are automatically forwarded to the platform and processed normally.

This means that a brief, planned stop — one where the agent is brought back online within a few minutes — will generally result in no metric loss whatsoever.

However, if the agent remains OFFLINE for an extended period, the SAF persistent storage buffer may reach its capacity limit. Once that happens, incoming metrics begin to be silently dropped — no error is shown to the operator, and the lost data cannot be recovered.

The images below illustrate the environment before and after disabling:

Before — Environment enabled (metrics being captured and buffered):

After — Environment disabled (metric capture stopped at source):

Starting the Agent Again¶

Unlike the restart action — which can be triggered directly from the BizMetry web console — a stopped agent cannot be started remotely from the platform. Once an agent is OFFLINE, BizMetry has no communication channel through which to issue a start command.

To bring a stopped agent back online, you must access the host machine where the agent is deployed and re-run the agent installation script from the installer image previously downloaded from BizMetry.

Refer to Downloading and Deploying an Agent for instructions on obtaining the installer image and running the installation script.

Quick Reference — Stop Checklist¶

Before stopping an agent in a production environment, use this checklist to minimize operational risk:

• Confirm the agent is in REACHABLE status before initiating the stop.
• Notify any teams that depend on the affected datasources that an interruption is expected.
• If the agent will remain OFFLINE for more than a few minutes, disable the associated environment to prevent SAF buffer saturation.
• Monitor the agent card until it transitions to OFFLINE.
• Once the maintenance or intervention is complete, restart the agent and confirm it returns to ONLINE.
• Re-enable the environment if it was disabled during the stop window.
• Review agent logs after restart to confirm clean operation.

Related Topics¶

• Restarting an Agent
• Agent Monitoring
• Viewing Agent Logs
• Configuring an Agent
• Accessing Environments