How To: Setup and Troubleshoot Peer Only Advance Agents

Purpose:

This document will provide you with information on troubleshooting and understanding how peer only advance agents are deployed.

You will first need to create the advance agent. Right click the desired agent configuration and click "Advance Agent".
It is recommended that you leave the file locations as default. You should also check off the "Peer only" box and decide what kind of bandwidth you want to use when deploying.

Monitor the bottom of the console window for the advance agent build to complete.

Once saved, you can then create a scheduled task. Click the "Schedule a push of an advance agent configuration" button on the toolbar. Then select from the available agents.

Do not start the task yet. We will now need to make sure a device that already has an agent on the same subnet has the advance agent files. On this device, I will be mirroring my ldlogon/advanceagent folder in the sdmcache.

This machine will then be the peer that our devices receive the advance agent.
Back on the console, drag the device you want to deploy to onto the task we created earlier. After being started, the status will cycle from "Cannot find agent" to "The agent setup program ran successfully." This indicates that the small MSI was given to the device and ran. This does NOT indicate that the final EXE finished successfully. It is not possible to tell except to monitor the inventory for updates when the agent finishes installing.

To be sure that the advance agent files are being downloaded from a peer and not the core, you can check IIS logs to see if a download is taking place.
IIS Logs are located here (on your core): C:\inetpub\logs\LogFiles\W3SVC1
Open the latest IIS log and do a search for the filename of your advance agent. In my case, it's "Peer+Only+Windows+Agent.exe". There are +'s because I have spaces in my agent configuration's name.
If the agent is downloading from a peer, you will see the following:

Note the many GET commands. You will only see a HEAD following by nothing if the agent is not pulling from the core.
You can also check the following log on the target device: C:\Windows\Temp\AdvanceAgent.log
This log will always indicate it is downloading from your core, but this will not be the case. If "Peer only" is checked when creating the advance agent, it will never download directly from the core, even if no other source is available.