A network engineer deploys a ThousandEyes Docker agent on a switch using app-hosting.

In the Designing and Implementing Enterprise Network Assurance (300-445 ENNA) implementation guide, the Cisco IOS XE Application Hosting lifecycle is a critical concept for troubleshooting and configuration management. When an application environment variable—such as proxy settings or account tokens—is modified in the app-hosting configuration, a simple restart of the container is insufficient to apply those changes.

The correct procedure involves moving the application back through its lifecycle states to ensure the new environment variables are injected. This requires executing the full agent lifecycle (Option C): Stop, Deactivate, Activate, and Start .

Stop: Terminates the current running process of the container.

Deactivate: Releases the allocated hardware resources (CPU, Memory) and, most importantly, clears the runtime environment.

Activate: Re-allocates the resources and injects the updated configuration parameters into the container ' s environment variables.

Start: Initiates the container with the newly applied configuration settings.

After the application is up and running, the ThousandEyes-agent process attempts to connect to the controller in the cloud environment. Without the deactivate/activate sequence, the container continues to use the environment variables present at the time of its initial activation, causing the agent to remain offline as it fails to reach the ThousandEyes portal without the proxy. Reinstalling (Option B) would work but is an unnecessarily lengthy process, while No action (Option D) will result in no change to the agent ' s connectivity status.