PDQ Agent End of Life Discussion
Colby Bouma
https://www.pdq.com/blog/pdq-agent-status-update/
Our new website does not currently have a comments system for blogs, so please leave your comments on this post in the meantime.
2
Comments
The original comment thread from our Agent Status Update blog post:
Rich
September 23, 2019 at 10:43 am
I really hope it comes back, though I really hope PDQ offers a Web-Based Cloud/Onpremise version. Where the agent would check into.
Emily
September 24, 2019 at 7:09 am
Rich,
Thank you for the feedback. We are beginning research into a possible Agent replacement. I will be sure your ideas of Web-Based Cloud/Onpremise are brought to the table.
David McCoy
September 23, 2019 at 11:15 am
I loved the agents ability to tell me when a laptop is online and off of our network, this was very useful information for us that we came to rely on. Will be very missed :_(
Emily
September 24, 2019 at 7:09 am
David and Tony,
Thank you for your feedback. Sadly, although the Agent was working for you, the majority of other users had Agents that were merely limping along (or at times not working at all). These decisions are never easy to make and we knew there would be customers that would be adversely affected. I’m very sorry that you are part of those customers that are impacted. Please know that we do very much appreciate your business and patience while we start researching a possible replacement.
Tony
September 23, 2019 at 11:17 am
Oh man… it works great for me and I really do not want to see it go. This is terrible news. Please release an alternative.
Emily
September 26, 2019 at 8:47 am
Tony,
I hope you were able to see my response, it was directed to you and David (see directly above). I didn’t realize when I responded that it wouldn’t go to both of you. I just didn’t want you to think you were disregarded in any way.
Thanks,
Emily
Caleb
September 23, 2019 at 12:53 pm
We’re bummed to see this go, however, your transparency and updates are very appreciated and help us plan accordingly. I hope you can restart this project and have better success!
Emily
September 24, 2019 at 7:08 am
Caleb,
Thank you for your feedback. We do try to be as transparent as possible. We hope we can continue to be a company you can trust.
Shawn
September 25, 2019 at 8:18 am
Definitely will miss the agent. Our company highly needs something similar to this. Over half of our machines with pdq are remote and constantly moving around. With nothing to get them to call home I have no way to keep them updated. Keep up the development….doing good letting us know whats going on.
Emily
September 25, 2019 at 12:17 pm
Shawn,
Thank you for the feedback, we value what each customer has to say. We do understand that we’ve now made working with remote machines a pain and your need for something similar. It was a very difficult decision to have to make knowing that our customers might have to take a step back. We really appreciate your understanding of our need for more research and development and we very much thank you for your patience while we do so.
Emily
Jason
September 25, 2019 at 8:53 am
Too bad you couldn’t get it working. I only had it on a couple machines, but it was very useful. Just curious though – did you try jiggling the handle? You should try that before you kill it.
Emily
September 25, 2019 at 12:20 pm
Jason,
Sadly, we did try jiggling the handle, turning it off and on again, and even bribing it with homemade pecan pie. It just wasn’t having any of it.
Thanks for a touch of humor and the smile,
Emily
Mark
September 26, 2019 at 3:55 am
Too bad to see this go.
We use PDQ as well for over a year and I was just about to look into the agent to maintain systems that are outside a lot.
Can you please, since you are a company that share openly updates etc. good stuff, tell us when there will be a new beta expected?
Thanks,
Mark
Emily
September 26, 2019 at 7:52 am
Mark,
I really wish I could tell you a date, but even we don’t know that. We’ve just begun exploring. I anticipate with something of this size, we will reach out to users to find some alpha testers. If you would like to be on the list, please subscribe to this blog to join our mailing list.
Thanks,
Emily
Chad Parris
September 26, 2019 at 7:37 am
Please build a customer-premise-based DMZ agent handler like McAfee does and charge another license for it. That way it will support local custom packages and put zero load on PDQ’s infrastructure so cost you nothing.
Have the agent handler punch out host-specific signatures for the agent and do cert-based auth for the inbound.
Support self-signed or “real” certs please and all the customers will need to do is have an external dis record that gets nat’d to the DMZ handler. Then limit communication across the DMZ to 443 and do the same between the agent handler and inventory. I sent Lisa this same design. Ignore calls for cloud-based solutions that will just cost everyone money. If the customers want to run it in the cloud let them. Hint: I would build the handler on a technology that will run on Linux or Windows as most folks don’t put windows in the DMZ. All you would need to do is change the port of operation on your current agent and remove the inbound target parameter that is pdq hosted, and let the client replace it with their own external dis record. If you want, you can do the cert-specifying on the agent on existing inventory and build the feature to import known-certs there, making the DMZ handler truly a proxy that you can download from SourceForge. You can even set it to translate the inbound port to 7777 or whatever inventory is listening on, but you need to talk 443 across the internet and do tls with the handler in the DMZ to work properly and require 1-way 1-port traffic (I would do 443 again) from the handler to inventory. You realize we’ll pay for this, right?
Emily
September 26, 2019 at 8:42 am
Chad,
Thank you very much for the candid feedback and great ideas. I am personally not a developer, so I can’t speak to the exacts of your suggestions, but I will make sure they are seen by the team working on this. We’ve had many suggestions and I’m happy to pass on another to be considered.
Thanks again,
Emily
Dan
September 26, 2019 at 10:18 am
Busch League, this was half the reason we bought the product. This company needs to take a serious look in the mirror if they want to survive. #NeverAgain
Shawn
September 26, 2019 at 2:10 pm
Dan, I couldn’t agree more, and I’m one of the founders of PDQ.com. Our team realizes that we have over 25,000 companies who pay for our products and they deserve products that work. You’re spot on and #NeverAgain will we allow this to happen.
Shawn Anderson
Co-founder/CEO
Peter
October 1, 2019 at 4:17 pm
What Chad said
Marc Lafortune
October 10, 2019 at 7:55 am
Hi,
I would like to second what Chad said! Very good design idea and yes we would be ready to pay an extra for this!
Jordan
October 16, 2019 at 10:45 am
So many ideas and ways to make this work! I hope it comes back soon! It is a feature that provides a lot of value, and if you can expand it to support custom packages and scan profiles, it will be crazy useful.
Nick Marino
October 30, 2019 at 9:44 am
Well this is really disappointing, I bought PDQ Deploy/Inventory last month because of the expectation I could use the agents to manage my large remote workforce. Hope it makes a comeback soon.
Kelly
October 31, 2019 at 12:07 pm
We share your disappointment. We wanted much more from the Agent but could not deliver in its current form. For now, we’ll continue to focus on new features and improving the performance of PDQ Deploy and Inventory.
RIchard
October 30, 2019 at 11:22 am
Ugh, Being able to get a status on remote machines with the agent was pretty much the deciding factor when we switched to this software.
Kelly
October 31, 2019 at 12:06 pm
We certainly can understand your frustration. We, as well as many of our customers, have been frustrated with the performance of the Agent. It was that frustration that caused us to take a long look at the architecture needed to create an Agent that could perform up to expectations. A replacement is not out of the question, but we will not release a future Agent unless it performs up to expectations.
Steve Mason
October 30, 2019 at 12:40 pm
We have a suite of apps, new versions every year and 4 updates per year. The installs HAVE to run as the user.
Ever since we switched from Netware, and Zen (with an agent) back in ’04, no product has been able to deploy these apps.
The fact that PDQ can do it easily, and without an agent is sheer sorcery!
We don’t need no steenkin’ agent! 🙂
Emily
November 4, 2019 at 10:10 am
Thank you for your feedback and for the smile. In the sea of muck with these tough decisions, it’s nice to hear that there are those out there that are still happy with what we have to offer. Thanks again!
Julius Beard
October 30, 2019 at 12:49 pm
This is one of the primary reasons we went with PDQ over some competitors. Very disappointing. Can you give anything more than vague future for an agent option? If this has been completely removed from a realistic roadmap we will have to find a new solution. We just expanded our license count. Had we known this, I don’t know that we would have done that.
Kelly
October 31, 2019 at 12:07 pm
We are continuing to explore our options for an Agent in the future, but unfortunately, we don’t have a timeline. There are architectural reasons why the Agent did not perform up to expectations. These limitations need to be addressed before an Agent replacement can be born.
Lucas
October 30, 2019 at 2:05 pm
The agent was one of the reasons we switched to your software from a competitor and I just renewed. Very disappointed in this. Will an alternative with some of the features be available before you remove it completely?
Kelly
October 31, 2019 at 12:07 pm
We apologize for the timing. We did try to nurse the Agent along for quite some time but came to the conclusion that it simply could not perform up to our expectations. Removing the Agent will allow us to improve the overall performance of PDQ Deploy and PDQ Inventory and explore our Agent options for the future.
Justin
November 1, 2019 at 9:32 am
I am glad I found this prior to purchasing. It’s one thing to deprecate a feature due to issues, it’s another to deprecate and offer no timeline, guidance, or response other than “Sorry, we f’d up! Hope we can fix it soon!”
Shawn
November 1, 2019 at 2:02 pm
Hi Justin, your frustration is completely understandable. At this point the only thing that would be worse than not giving a timeline would be to give a timeline and then not make it. All those chips have been spent so we’ve decided to proceed with an (over)abundance of caution.
I understand that the Agent wasn't working nearly as well as intended but it definitely helped us out!
We've got a 70/30 split of laptops vs desktops as of this year and it was great using the Agent to scan when people were remote (VPN). A lot of our users hop on and off VPN all day long and by the time DNS catches up to them so Inventory can scan them properly, they're long gone.
It's also priceless knowing that our problem children aren't rebooting their laptops for +30 days and the Agent is helping return this info to us!
I never had single remote deployment to work, but I will greatly miss the ability scan our offsite computers. If there is every a re-release of the agent would it possible to direct scans and pull deployments directly to/from our PDQ installs. Lansweeper agent scans works this way. I have never tried to deploy software from Lansweeper so IDK if its the same. Granted it may take some extra setup on the users part, but it would remedy the overload on your infrastructure.
This really needs to come back.
We're deploying more and more mobile users every day it seems.
The product was still in beta why EOL it so quickly?
If it wasn't performing to your standards then why not just fix it(it was in beta, everyone knows to expect bugs)
This is something I would absolutely pay a monthly fee for.
It's 2019 and in this current time of automation there's no reason why each customer couldn't be spun up in their own google compute instance or something like that, you could seed the instances and turn them into mirrors for our PDQ deploy installs, which would further cut down on load.
PLEASE BRING IT BACK!
Frank,
We understand and share your frustration. After multiple attempts to improve the agent performance, we realized that the underlying architecture would not allow the agent to perform up to expectations. We are looking at options, but we don't have any timeline at this point.
why not just bring it back local only?
Just want to echo that we really need this as soon as we can. We were planning on deploying it and then we saw that was EOL so we didn't of course. We have more and more laptops and they need 3rd party patching just as much as desktops on site.
Then this whole Covid-19 thing happened and now I have even more remote users and even more of a need to patch them remotely.
We will not have a replacement for the Agent any time soon.
Instead, here are some resources that may help you get Deploy and Inventory working over a VPN:
https://www.pdq.com/blog/setting-up-pdq-to-work-with-remote-workers/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0aNQQiuQvY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgSTbLY_0qE
Would it be possible to just have a simple agent that had a computer call home and report its IP to Inventory when it changes? I know that would solve most of my problems.