when I shutdown the agent the Jopr Server takes more than 14 minutes to detect the agent was down.

The issue you are seeing is not related to the availability checking performed on the agent - you are killing the agent entirely, so the agent is never reporting any availability data at all to the server.

To support cases like this (where the agent is completely down or unresponsive), periodically, the server needs to check to see what agents it hasn't heard from in a long time and then determine which of these "suspect" agents are really down.

Read this for background on this issue:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=RHQ-1098

That tells you why we increased the default time.

Read this for more and it talks about the new default time:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=RHQ-2349

"We have a quiet time of 15m right now (recently changed to that)."

What does this mean? It means, by default, if we have heard from an agent in 15 minutes (what we call the agent's "quiet time"), only then do we mark that agent and all of its resources down. This is why it takes more than 14 minutes to detect your agent was down.

If you do not like that, and you want it to report down faster, then, yes, you can change this - its configurable in the GUI... go to the main menu "Administration>SystemConfiguration>Settings" and change the setting "Agent Max Quiet Time Allowed" to something shorter. Note: the shorter your allowed quiet time interval is, the greater the possibility of a "false negative" - for example, if you set quiet time to 5 minutes and if your server can't process all your agent's availability reports fast enough, it may think it hasn't heard from an agent when in fact it just hasn't had time to process the latest avail report. When an agent is determined to be down, the server has to "backfill it" - marking all of its resources down - and this is expensive. So you don't want to do this often.