Remote Agents

ARC can register and monitor remote agent instances running on other machines. Remote agents are tracked by name, endpoint, and transport type, with built-in health checking.

Registering a Remote Agent

arc remote add my-server https://agent.example.com:8080 --transport http
arc remote add build-box ssh://[email protected] --transport ssh --profile worker
arc remote add mcp-relay mcp://relay.local:9090 --transport mcp

Each agent gets a unique ID, and you can optionally bind it to an ARC profile.

Listing Remote Agents

arc remote list
arc remote list --json

The table displays each agent's name, endpoint, transport protocol, last-known status, and associated profile.

Health Checks

Check the status of a specific agent or all registered agents at once:

# Check a single agent by ID
arc remote check <id>

# Check all registered agents
arc remote check

Health checks contact the remote endpoint and update the agent's status to online, offline, or unknown. The check summary shows how many agents are reachable.

Removing a Remote Agent

arc remote remove <id>

Transport Types

Transport	Protocol	Use Case
http	HTTP/HTTPS	Web-hosted agents, REST endpoints
ssh	SSH tunnel	Build servers, CI runners
mcp	MCP protocol	MCP relay servers, tool proxies

The default transport is http if not specified.

TUI Agent Management

The TUI Agents view displays real remote agent data from the registry with full keyboard-driven management.

Key	Action
c	Check health of the selected agent (or all agents)
a	Add a new remote agent
d	Remove the selected agent
↑ / ↓	Navigate the agent list

The view shows each agent's name, endpoint, transport, status (online, offline, unknown), and associated profile.

Web Dashboard Agent Management

The Web Dashboard Agents view provides full agent management through a browser interface:

• Browse — view all registered agents with endpoint, transport, and status
• Add — register a new remote agent with endpoint and transport type
• Remove — unregister an agent from the registry
• Health check — check the status of individual agents or all agents at once

Health check results update in real time over WebSocket. Status changes are immediately visible to all connected dashboard clients.

TIP

Remote agents are fully managed from all three interfaces — CLI, TUI, and Web Dashboard.

Use Cases

Monitoring Distributed Agents

Register all your agents across different machines and run periodic health checks to verify they are reachable:

arc remote add prod-claude https://prod.internal:8080
arc remote add staging-gemini https://staging.internal:8081 --transport http
arc remote check

Profile-Bound Agents

Bind a remote agent to an ARC profile so its status appears in the profile detail view:

arc remote add ci-worker ssh://[email protected] --profile worker --transport ssh

Dark Factory Integration

Remote agents pair with Dark Factory mode for multi-machine orchestration. Register worker agents and coordinate them through the task system.

Storage

Remote agent registrations are stored in ~/.arc/remote/agents.json. Status is updated in-place after each health check. The web dashboard exposes remote agents via the /api/agents REST endpoint with full CRUD and health-check support. See Web Dashboard for details.