Visual Studio Online / Azure DevOps load testing - On-premise agent service is not starting

This is a simple troubleshooting post related to VisualStudio Online or Azure DevOps load testing.

The load testing needs agent programs to be installed on multiple machines to generate load. We can use agents provided by Microsoft as well if our application is straight forward and accessible from Microsoft hosted agents.

If we are in Enterprise or in restricted environments, we may have application hosted internally and only accessible via domain joined machines or via other constraints. Then we need to run the agent program on premise.

Problem

The agent program is a windows services which we can see in services.msc console. Sometimes the agent service gets stopped and below error will show up when we try to restart.

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Services
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The VSTSLoadAgentService service on Local Computer started and then stopped. Some services stop automatically if they are not in use by other services or programs.
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OK 
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Solution

Since this Azure DevOps load testing tool is deprecated now and ending its life next year around this time, lets not go into the details why its not working. Lets see a hack.

As standard Microsoft solution which is as famous as machine restart, lets uninstall and install the agent program again and it will work.

Since the installation is by running below PowerShell scripts, it doesn't seems polluting registry and all.

Uninstalling agent

Uninstall command needs the agent name. If the name if unknown, first we need to get agents list. Example is as follows.

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.ManageVSTSCloudLoadAgent.ps1 -TeamServicesAccountName https://<organization>.visualstudio.com -PATToken <PATToken> -AgentGroupName <group name> -GetAgents

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to uninstall an agent follow the below command.

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.ManageVSTSCloudLoadAgent.ps1 -TeamServicesAccountName https://<organization>.visualstudio.com -PATToken <PATToken> -DeleteAgent -AgentGroupName <group name> -AgentName <agent name>

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Now install the agent again.

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.ManageVSTSCloudLoadAgent.ps1 -TeamServicesAccountName https://<organization>.visualstudio.com -PATToken <PATToken> -ConfigureAgent -AgentGroupName <group name>

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The ManageVSTSCloudLoadAgent.ps1 file can be downloaded from this location. The commands above has some parameters enclosed in '<' & '>' as placeholders. We need to use actual values there.