Hi,
I understand that there is some confusion and frustration around this issue. I hope that I can share some details that will help to make things a bit clearer.
I had a session earlier today with relevant R&D owners in the Management, SD-WAN and IoT products. The purpose was to double-check a few things and to see where we can improve going forward.
In the last few weeks, we started to gradually deploy a process aimed to simplify the onboarding of products that rely on the nano-agent architecture (cpnano). These products include SD-WAN and IoT, and in the future will include more products like AIOps and Infinity Identity.
Until recently, when onboarding to SD-WAN or IoT, there was a mandatory manual step of installing a nano-agent on the gateway and connecting it with a token to the profile. This complicates onboarding and we wanted to improve upon this experience.
Since the need for a gateway to communicate with the Infinity Portal (via nano-agents) is becoming more common, we wanted to enable it automatically for all environments that are using the Infinity Portal. This is not that different from gateways' ability to communicate with ThreatCloud. So when you connect a Management to the Infinity Portal (via the Infinity Services page) or for Smart-1 Cloud (which is implicitly connected to the Infinity Portal), we are activating the nano-agents on the gateways and providing them with a token behind the scenes.
I want to emphasize that this process was created to simplify onboarding for many products (including SD-WAN) and it was not deployed as part of an IoT marketing campaign. That statement should not have been given to you.
I do understand that unexpectedly seeing more agents in the portal can be confusing, and we will try to learn from this case on how we can do this more transparently.
In the spirit of transparency, I can share that we have been considering the option to provide some IoT visibility to all customers (even without a license), but this has not yet been deployed. It's possible that these discussions contributed to the confusion and the statement about an IoT marketing campaign.
I also want to relate to the output of the "cpnano -s" command. This command reflects which profiles or "configuration topics" the agent is monitoring and which nano-services are actually running. An agent will "monitor" or "listen" to multiple profiles because they may be relevant in the future. However, if they have not been activated, it does not impact the agent behavior and nothing from that profile is running. The rows that appear in the command output table, and in the Infinity Portal UI column reflect the profiles that it's listening on. The fact that you saw "IoT Configuration" or "IoT Discovery" in the table does not mean that something from IoT is running. Above the table, you can see the list of nano-services that are actually running and they will explicitly state "Status: Running".
I attached two images, one showing a machine that is just listening on multiple IoT profiles (as was probably the case in your environment) and another image that shows how the output looks like when IoT nano-services are actually running.
One thing that we are taking from this discussion is that we need to improve and clarify the output of the command and the way we show profiles that are just "listening" versus "running".
Sorry for the long post, but I hope that it helps shed some light on the issue.
Please do share further feedback (you can do so directly as well) as we want to improve and be clear towards our customers.
I'm looping in @danielcoh and @Uri_Bialik in case there are further questions on IoT behavior.
Regards,
Tomer
