Deploy high availability for Remote Agents

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This document describes how to configure a secondary Remote Agent as a backup to achieve high availability. By doing so, it eliminates a single point of failure in your execution environment.

Failover mechanism and configuration

To ensure system resilience, the following rules apply:

  • Automatic takeover: If the primary agent becomes unavailable, the secondary agent automatically takes over the remote execution of actions, jobs, and connectors after a 30-second downtime.
  • Task failure: If the primary agent fails during a task execution, that specific task fails and must be manually re-run. All other pending tasks are immediately routed to the secondary agent.

Set up high availability

Follow these steps to configure a secondary agent for high availability:

  1. Go to SOAR settings > Advanced > Remote Agents.
  2. On the primary agent, click View more to view the agent's details.
  3. Click Add secondary agent.
    1. To update the primary agent to the latest version, click Update
    2. If your connectors are an older version, you must deploy them to support high availability. For more information, see Redeploy connectors.
  4. Follow the process to set up a secondary agent (using either manual installation or Docker).

  5. Check the status of the secondary agent on the Remote Agents page, under the High Availability column.

Operational notes (high availability)

This section details the system's operational behavior following the high availability setup, including the failover rules for configuration deployment and the default notification settings for agent status and downtime.

Failover and configuration

  • Primary agent focus: After setting up high availability, continue to interact and work primarily with the designated Primary Agent across the platform.
  • Secondary configuration role: If the primary agent is inactive, the secondary agent automatically becomes active to ensure any configuration deployment tasks are completed successfully.

Agent notifications

  • Default behavior: Agent notifications are enabled by default for events, such as new agent versions and agent downtime.
  • Downtime trigger: Notifications for agent downtime are specifically triggered when a Remote Agent has been down for more than 90 seconds.
  • Opt-out: You can opt out of these notifications at any time from your user preferences.

For more detailed information on configuring notifications, see Agent notifications.

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