You are right. It is not a good idea to start messing with these files. Plus these files are temporary, meaning if you reboot the server, will be lost. These directories are automatically created by cloudera agent with the name of 'Auto-increment'-'service'-'roletype'. Eg. 1000-hdfs-NAMENODE 1001-yarn-NODEMANAGER   The cloudera agent will retrieve this information from Cloudera Manager server. There is no permanent local storage for configuration files.   Any such configuration change should be done using Cloudera Manager.   But if (for whatever reason) you need to do it, then yes you can kill it. Cloudera agent does not rely on communication with Cloudera Manager to do the automatic restart. And since there this restart is not issued by Cloudera Manager, it will restart the service on the same "/var/run/cloudera-scm-agent/process/service_dir" directory. If the command restart comes from the Cloudera Manager, then a new folder is created. You should be carefull because this changes should be pushed to CM. If not, on a service restart by CM those changes will be lost. ... View more