Azure DevOps Self hosted agent error connectivity issues

Question

We are using Azure DevOps Self hosted agents to build and release our application. Often we are seeing below error and recovering automatically. Does anyone know what is this error,how to tackle this and where to exactly check logs about the error?

We stopped hearing from agent <agent name>. Verify the agent machine is running and has a healthy network connection. Anything that terminates an agent process, starves it for CPU, or blocks its network access can cause this error. For more information, see: https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink?Linkid=846610

Answer 1

This seems to be a known issue with both self-hosted and Microsoft-hosted agents that many people have been reporting .

Quoting the reply from @zachariahcox from the Azure Pipelines Product Group:

To provide some context, the azure pipelines agent is composed of two processes: agent.listener and agent.worker (one of these per step in the job ). The listener is responsible for reporting that workers are still making progress. If the agent.listener is unable to communicate with the server for 10 minutes (we attempt to communicate every minute), we assume something has Gone Wrong and abandon the job.

So, if you're running a private machine, anything that can interfere with the listener's ability to communicate with our server is going to be a problem.

Among the issues i've seen are anti-virus programs identifying it as a threat, local proxies acting up in various ways, the physical machine running out of memory or disk space (quite common), the machine rebooting unexpectedly, someone ctrl+c'ing the whole listener process, the work payload being run at a way higher priority than the listener (thus "starving" the listener out), unit tests shutting down network adapters (quite common), having too many agents at normal priority on the same machine so they starve each other out, etc.

If you think you're seeing an issue that cannot be explained by any of the above (and nothing jumps out at you from the _diag logs folder), please file an issue at https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/support/devops/

If everything seems to be perfectly alright with your agent and none of the steps mentioned in the Pipeline troubleshooting guide help, please report it on Developer Community where the Azure DevOps Team and DevOps community are actively answering questions.