QUESTION
What is the difference between Suspend Alarms and Suspend Agent?
ANSWER
Suspending an Agent (Agent Tab -> Suspend)
This effectively stops the agent from checking in. The agent will not run any procedures and the agent icon will appear offline on the endpoint.
The agent will still be running but any scheduled jobs will not execute (as these are scheduled on the Kaseya server and sent down to the agent when it checks in).
You will not receive agent offline alerts for suspended agents.
However, if the agent is set to monitor event logs, for example, these events are tracked by the agent and will be queued up on the disk at the endpoint, ready to be sent to the Kaseya server when the agent is back online. When the agent is un-suspended, this backlog of events will be sent to the Kaseya server and you will receive post-dated event messages.
This is often used if you are making changes to a machine and don't want the agent changing things - for example, if you are upgrading the OS or applying updates, you may not want the Patch Management or an audit to start in the middle of the upgrade/patching cycle.
Suspending Alarms (Monitor Tab -> Suspend Alarm)
The agent will continue to run on the machine and run agent procedures.
The only thing that this does is tell the Kaseya server to discard any and all alarms from that agent. When an alarm is generated by the agent state - the low disk, off-line, perfmon counter, etc, the Kaseya server, instead of creating a ticket, sending an email, running a procedure, or generating an alarm will simply do nothing, not at the time that the alarm is created, nor in the future - the event is sent to <NULL>.
This is typically used when you are doing maintenance on a machine and this would cause an alarm situation - you may be taking a server off-line to make hardware changes, and you don't want to be told about the server being off-line. Another example may be that you are going to be testing an agent procedure, and don't want to be flooded with "Agent Procedure Failed" messages while you are testing the procedure.