Announcing Release of Chocolatey Agent 2.2.0

Discussed below are the changes included in this release, but we also have a full set of release notes available:

• Chocolatey Agent v2.2.0

New Background Job Management System

With the release of v2.2.0 of Chocolatey Agent, the internal logic of how “jobs” are managed has changed. This now gives much more flexibility and scalability in terms of how Chocolatey Agent operates. From an outside perspective, there should be no visible changes, and Chocolatey Agent should operate exactly the same way as it did previously. The only known difference that you may encounter is a change to how some logging is completed within the Chocolatey Agent log file.

Scheduled retry logic for reporting into Chocolatey Central Management

When configured to report into Chocolatey Central Management, the first thing that Chocolatey Agent does when it starts up is to try to communicate with the Chocolatey Central Management Service. Prior to the v2.2.0 release, if it was not able to establish communication initially, it would re-attempt a few times, however, it eventually would stop trying, and it would report an error in the Chocolatey Agent log file. Once this initial connection attempt was made, and a connection was not established, it would have been necessary to restart the Chocolatey Agent Windows Service in order to re-connect. There are several reasons that this could cause a problem. For example, when using remote workstations that first need to connect to a VPN to the office before a connection to the Chocolatey Central Management Service would even be possible. In this type of situation, the connection attempts to the Chocolatey Central Management Service might have already failed to complete, before the VPN connection was established. As a result, Chocolatey Agent would not be able to report anything back to Chocolatey Central Management without first being restarted.

To help with this type of issue, the logic with Chocolatey Agent has changed in the v2.2.0 release. Now, if after some initial re-tries, Chocolatey Agent is not able to communicate with the Chocolatey Central Management Service, it will halt and then re-attempt the process after a set period. By introducing this retry period, it gives any setup/configuration that needs to be completed on the computer time to be completed, which then allows Chocolatey Agent to make the connection to the Chocolatey Central Management Service. This retry logic will continue indefinitely until either the Chocolatey Agent Service is stopped, or a connection to the Chocolatey Central Management Service is made.

Learn More

To find out more about Chocolatey Agent, check out the documentation.