Introduction
The Landscape agent watcher is a long-running process on each agent host that detects file events and ships them to the central index. This is an intro paragraph long enough to push the next heading down the page so the TOC has something to track.
The watcher coalesces events over a 250ms window to avoid shipping every keystroke during text-editor saves. Output is batched and pushed via the central transport channel.
Event types
Four event types flow upstream — create, modify, delete, and move. Each carries the absolute path, inode (POSIX) or stable hash (Windows), size, mtime, and owner.
Create
Triggered when a new inode appears in a watched root. The watcher correlates with the parent directory's last-snapshot to skip events from initial-bootstrap scans.
Modify
Existing inode's content or mtime changes. The watcher debounces to avoid amplifying every save during streaming writes.
Delete
Soft-delete with 30-day retention before purge. The drift reconciler closes any local→central mismatches every hour.
Move
Inode path changes. POSIX uses inode tracking for atomic correlation; Windows uses SHA-256 hashing of the file content. Either way a single move event is emitted, never delete + create.
Heartbeats
Default cadence is every 60 seconds. Override with --heartbeat=30s for tighter monitoring during a deploy or rolling restart.
Staleness
An agent is considered stale after six minutes of no heartbeat. The dashboard surfaces a "needs investigation" chip on stale agents.
Drift reconciliation
The drift reconciler runs hourly. It compares the agent's local index against the central record and closes entries that disagree.