In some scenarios, you’ll find computers that you’ve just deployed the Operations Manager agent to, listed as having a healthy agent status, also shown to be in a not monitored state. Figure 1 shows several computers with this status. A computer is in a state where the Operations Manager agent is shown to be in a healthy state and the computer is not monitored when the management pack for the computer’s operating system is not installed. For example, the computers shown below are in this state because it was only after I took this screenshot that I installed the Windows Server 2012 R2 related management packs.
FIGURE 1 Not monitored
Another reason why the status of a server might show as not monitored is because you have uninstalled and then reinstalled it. The default configuration of Operations Manager has the grooming of deleted agents occur after 48 hours. If the previous agent information is still in the database, the newly installed agent won’t be recognized.
If the Operations Manager agent is shown as healthy, but is dimmed, it means that the health service on the monitored computer is not receiving heartbeat data from the Operations Manager agent. The healthy status is shown in gray because everything was functioning properly at some point in the recent past. Common causes for a gray state include:
- Heartbeat failure
- Nonfunctioning health service
- Improper configuration
- System workflows failure
- Poor Operations Manager or data warehouse database performance
- Network problems
- Authentication issues
When diagnosing the cause of gray agents, you can run the Show Gray Agent Connectivity Data task. This will provide the following information:
- The last time a management server received a heartbeat from the agent.
- The status of the System Center Management Health service.
- Whether the agent responds to ping requests.
- The last time the agent’s configuration was updated.
- The management server to which the agent reports.
