“Last seen” online status is a verry importion function for us. We use this information for many situations.
Up until now i was never under the impression that this information would display false information.
Yesterday I got information from our tech that we have several devices with at least one customer that have false online status: What I can see is that those devices are offline for month, yet they have made AV scans a few days ago.
I’d like to know if anybody else is aware of this problem.
Tech support has confirmed that they got 3 files for 3 affected devices.
@Lukas: We are aware of this solved problem. Yet this will change nothing about the fact that there are devices that have an online status that says that the client was online 10 month ago. My tech stuff has been working yesterday on several customer devices. Avast GUI and local status was fine, yet the device appears to be offline.
Again: Those defivces information regarding last AV scan was up to date! And other devices from the same customer do not have that problem! So I can definately rule out some firewall issues!
I assume that this problem was present quite some time befor the last incidents a few days ago, that Lukas is refering too.
This is just a feeling from my guts but it rarely proofed me wrong…
If you are working with this product for quite some time, you get some kind of “sensors” if something isn’t working as expected. Unfortunately the support guys at Avast seem to lack having such sensors… I can’t put that in other words… :
I checked the Agent version for all related device and it seems that this is the cause for the problem…
One has 22.8.1229
The other two have 22.7.1013.
This will lead to the following questions:
Can I upgrade only the agent instead of running a deinstallation and new installation?
Why is there no way within the hub to manually update the agent? This is not possible since I know the hub starting on may 2021…
What is the cause for having such outdated agent versions?
We have probably 258 clients with outdated agents which ar all prior 23.1.1331.
6 of these clients have a pretty up to date online time window less than 26 days ago which is not much but at least I can tell that those 6 are running agent 22.1.2687 up until 23.12.2783… so there are some exclusions that seem still to be able to present the correct online status?
Thus being said will still leave 258 with uncertain status which is either caused by the outdated agent or just of the fact that customers are not using those anymore… :o :-\
I count a leat 29 customers to whom those devices belong to just by sorting for the name of the domain…
There are plenty clients that are running in workgroups since they belong to smaller customers.
Unfortunately customers name are not displayed in partner device view. :o
I can understand that from Avast perspective it seems to easy recommending: “Just run the installer, everything will be ok.” But this is not how this will work for the partners with such an amount of outdated clients.
Has anybody from Avast thought about if there is really no other way of fixing this? Sometimes I get the feeling telling the partner/customer doing a reinstallation is the easy way for the support to get rid of the problem and close the case… ???
From those 252 clients here, I have diffrent combinations with columns online status and last AV-scan:
either:
fewer month online than last AV-scans made → at least this will implicate that this client was really still alive lately
fewer month last AV scan done then online → which implicates an additional problem (sub problem 1) being not able to catch up missed scans?!? Time diffrence here is several month in some cases!!!
no AV scan at all → which is either the same problem or also a new one (sub problem 2)
I am sorry this is happening, client software updates are supposed to be silent, automatic and shouldn’t bother our users.
Please on the affected devices create a support package for us to analyze - https://support.avast.com/en-us/article/submit-support-file/
You can post the package name here, we will check it once it is available. It doesn’t have to be collected on every device, you can post one or two and it might be enough. We will let you know.
This is likely problem in the software that needs to be fixed so it doesn’t happen again in the future. Thank you for your assistance.
Infratech Solutions: All those provided support packages were analyzed and we find out that the clients are up-to-date with latest version. There is no evidence of them running outdated version.
Thank you. Regarding devices stuck in “installing” state. It should be fixed with most devices now. Regarding the “last seen” issue - there are DNS resolution errors in nos.log, can you see in your local network if all DNS requests coming from clients are resolved correctly?
Update: This issue still persists. Had it a week ago with one of my kids Laptops, it then dissapeard. I’m still on it, found a new devices from which I will collect new support file next week.
Again, this issue is still present: We used to remove an install those clients in the past with customers where we had tech stuff on site but this is not a solution.
Today we found out that clients that have this issue have no Avast available under programs and feature in the control panel…
