Remote agent
It would be awesome if there were a remote PDQ agent that could be deployed and would communicate with PDQ Inventory and PDQ Deploy - similar to RMM tools on the market. PDQ products exceeds the capabilities of all RMM tools as far as system information and inventory as well as deployment. Even though PDQ does not have monitoring and patching abilities like the RMM tools have it would be a big gain for service providers to have this quality tool in their arsenal for remote networks, workstations, and servers - some which may not be domain connected or mobile.
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Comments
Excellent, great, fantastic, super news! The optional Agent is currently in beta (PDQ Inventory 16), and available now (not for production quite yet -but oh so soon). Here are some additional resources regarding the PDQ Agent:
Our official blog post:
https://www.pdq.com/blog/introducing-inventory-16/
Agent FAQ:
https://support.pdq.com/hc/en-us/articles/360003044012
Installing the Agent:
https://support.pdq.com/hc/en-us/articles/360003060671
Give it a test (not in production, unless you're Lex).
This would be amazing! I am forced to peruse other products if this feature is not released.
Thank you for your suggestion. We have an existing internal feature request ticket for this. I have no ETA on when it could be implemented.
This is awesome news Colby. I really hope this can gain a high priority very soon.
Agent is very good idea but in which stage of dev is it now? Coding or testing?
We cannot say.
I would really like to see this, too. If I understand correctly, what PDQ does now is poll computers to try to install the packages. It would be much more efficient if clients could connect to the server and ask "what do you have for me?" We've got computers that can be out of network for weeks or months at a time. When they do come into the office, the window could be very small.
We used to have an inventory package that would scan by polling. When we switched to a client push method, we got much more accurate results.
I love that PDQ is agentless. It's definitely an attractive feature that I don't want to lose, but an optional agent would be nice, because we have a scenario for 1-2% of our workstations in which an agent would be useful.
We have workstations outposted at several remote locations that are technically on the internal network (MAN) but those subnets are behind a router run by another team. Our router ACL allows traffic from their subnets to hit our subnets, but the other team's router ACL only allows traffic from our subnets to their subnets when the connection is first established from their subnets. Efforts to get the other team to modify their router ACL have been fruitless. Our only alternative is to set up a VPN server for these workstations to use...which I could do, but it seems silly to use VPN for internal communication...and just for PDQ.
So for us, all we need the agent for is to poll the PDQ servers for queued tasks and then initiate the task from the workstation. For example, in our environment, PDQ Deploy could potentially work in pull mode if the workstation actually initiated the task rather than the PDQ Deploy server. Same thing for PDQ Inventory scans.
Was going to create another post, but you guys said it all. Being able to create a HTTP/s repository, SQL Server Support, an agent installed on workstations with communication over http/s would take this already awesome product into the stratosphere. Working at a new company, they have no device management system in place and PDQ allowed me to get the job done! Thanks you guys! Also, I want to add that all the videos you guys do and how you treat employees will make this company successful for a long time coming! Keep the values!
Request Modification
* Make the agent an MSI (When the time is right) (With parameters to specify the server to connect to, port, Random Device GUID/ Unique ID, etc)
* Make agents communicate over http/s
* Make PDQ "Server Mode" connect over http/s so that consoles can be used from AWS or Azure
*Make consoles silently deployable as MSIs with parameters to specify mode, server, etc.
Very cool! The ability for computers outside the local network to be inventoried through PDQ.com is huge!
PDQ Inventory 16 is currently in beta and includes the new optional Agent. https://www.pdq.com/blog/introducing-inventory-16/
Based on the documentation, it looks like installation of the agent is a bit of a manual process. If that's correct, please consider an enhancement that would allow it to be auto-installed. With another product we use, the agent could be pushed during a scan, but the vendor also provided an installer that we could install via group policy.
Correct, we do not currently have anything in Inventory that will automatically start the Agent installation. In the meantime, here's how you can create a PDQ Deploy package: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/8fo84e/pdq_endpoint_agent_is_in_public_beta/dy7plgy/
Thank you for the feature request. It’s important, as we've been a customer-driven product since the beginning. I've made a note of the request, but cannot provide a timeline when, or if, the request will be approved or, if approved, with what version.
I note in the help files that the agent currently uses communication to PDQ.com.
while I do like the idea of an agent, and the future possibilities, I work in a secure environment and cannot allow communication to third parties that is outside of our control.
Will there be, or can there be a configuration option to disallow communication outside of your network?
Currently that cannot be disabled within the Agent itself. I recommend adding hosts file entries for agentapi.pdq.com and agentsapi.pdq.com