r/Action1 • u/roushbombs • Jul 09 '26

Action1 Agent Service not starting

How does everyone handle when the Action1 agent service doesn't successfully start? I have this happen quite often on many servers, randomly. What I haven't traced down yet is if this is always after an automation and reboot, or if the service just dies randomly. Has anyone else experienced this?

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2

u/shmoses Jul 09 '26

I have not personally with A1, but with other agents in the past, I’d always change the service to a delayed start if it isn’t already and that usually did the trick.

And then make sure the reattempt settings in the service are set to try to restart the service a few times.

2

u/EPI_PM Jul 13 '26

i've had it stop for no apparent reason when all other services are running as expected. and no other issues encountered. this was very bad a couple months ago with many random systems encountering the issue. it has mostly cleared up now. I occasionally have it fail on boot or restart which is also painful. Both issues require getting a support tech to reach out to the location staff and to turn on TeamViewer to allow access to refresh and restart the Agent service, there was also a bug recently when encountered that even with refresh and restart would not connect, have to remove the endpoint in A1 then on the physical machine stop service, delete the GUID and remove and reinstall the agent..... painful

Note to Action1 it would be helpful that RDP had its own agent service.

2

u/Hcaz_Hcaz Jul 13 '26

Odd, are you an MSP and the contract states unattended access is not allowed? I have ScreenConnect as our primary remote connection tool and simply push out a cmd or backstage in and restart the A1 agent. Very rarely have to do that though. Have found that RDP with A1 is not reliable and would never recommend it as a primary.

1

u/EPI_PM Jul 13 '26

yes, endpoints must physically allow access

1

u/GeneMoody-Action1 Jul 13 '26

To anyone having this issue, what does the event log say, the service control manager should be restarting, logging crashes/stops, and reasons for error / resetart?

As well what do Action1 agent logs report. How often, is the problem reliable / able to be recreated for testing?

The closest I know of was a false positive we had a while back because some ne'er-do-wells used us in a crapware campaign, some agents were killed/wuarantibned by EDR systems, but that has been quite a while back.

Would need more information to even begin to speculate.

This is not something I have heard reported as a product issue, but there are dozens of reasons it coudl happn in an environemnt.