Pause an agent

There are times when you need to perform maintenance work on an agent, such as upgrading the version or updating the configuration to add new drivers, but you have running pipelines that you can't allow to fail. In these cases, you can pause the agent, which gracefully puts it into a safe state to be worked on.

Pausing an agent will allow it to finish outstanding pipeline tasks before entering a Paused state. Any running or submitted pipelines destined for the agent during this Paused state will still be shown as active, and any new tasks from those pipelines will be safely queued until the agent is resumed after the Paused state.

While the agent is paused, Data Productivity Cloud users can continue to interact with the pipeline canvas in Designer.

---

Pausing an agent

1. On the Agents page, locate the agent you want to pause and click ....
2. Click Pause agent.
3. Type pause agent in the dialog, to confirm you understand the implications of the action, and then click Pause Agent again.

When paused, the agent first enters a Pausing state, during which it will complete any pipeline tasks it's currently executing. Once those tasks are completed, it moves to a Paused state and any queued tasks will be held in the queue until the agent is resumed.

If tasks are executing within a Transaction, the entire transaction will complete before the agent enters a Paused state.

Note

To be clear: it is individual tasks in progess that are completed, not the entire running pipeline. The pipeline will not progress any further until the agent resumes and its remaining queued tasks can be executed. The pipeline duration shown in the Pipeline run history will include any time that the pipeline spent waiting for a paused agent to resume.

---

Restarting a paused agent

When paused, the agent can be safely restarted on the cloud provider, as described in Restart an AWS ECS Fargate agent or Restart an Azure agent.

Note

When a paused agent is restarted on the cloud provider, the agent status will remain Paused until the queue automatically resumes or you manually resume the agent, as described below.

---

Resuming a paused agent

1. On the Agents page, locate the agent you want to resume and click ....
2. Click Resume agent.
3. Click Yes resume to confirm.

If an agent is left in a Paused state for 12 hours, it will automatically resume.

A resumed agent's status will be as follows:

• If the agent is actively connected and available, the resumed agent status will be Running and it will begin to execute queued tasks.
• If the agent was stopped during the pause and was never restarted, the resumed agent status will be Stopped.
• If the agent was taken offline, not gracefully stopped during the pause, and never restarted, the resumed agent status will be Unknown.

If a resumed agent is not in a running state, then any pipelines that had tasks queued during the pause will timeout after 15 minutes of the agent resuming, and the pipelines affected will be updated accordingly.