Stopping an MFT agent

You can stop a Managed File Transfer agent from the command line. When you stop an agent, you are quiescing the agent and allowing the agent to complete its current file transfer before stopping. You can also specify the -i parameter at the command line to stop an agent immediately. When the agent has stopped, you cannot use that agent to transfer files until you restart it.

Before you begin

If you want to check the names of the agents associated with a queue manager, you can list agents by using the IBM® MQ Explorer or the command line, see fteListAgents command.

About this task

To stop an agent from the command line, see fteStopAgent.

[MQ 9.3.0 Jun 2022] If an agent is stopped in a controlled manner using the fteStopAgent, then the agent does not accept any new managed transfer requests and waits for any in-progress transfers to complete before it actually shuts itself down. From IBM MQ 9.3.0, to show that the agent is still in a transient state, and therefore has not yet shut down and cannot yet be restarted, the agent enters the STOPPING state until any ongoing transfers are complete. This status appears in the output of the fteListAgents and fteShowAgentDetails commands, and in MFT REST API queries, and in the MFT plugin's Agents view of IBM MQ Explorer.

[Windows] If you have configured your agent to run as a Windows service, running the fteStopAgent command also stops the Windows service. Alternatively, you can stop the agent by stopping the service by using the Windows Services tool. For more information, see the topic Starting an MFT agent as a Windows service.