Working with Agents

Right-clicking an Agent opens a context-menu with all its available functions, which depend on whether it is active or not. This topic describes those functions or provides links to the corresponding descriptions.

Starting an Agent

Prerequisite: Enable the relevant ports in your firewall, so that the server process will be able to connect to the ServiceManager. You have to use the ports defined in the INI file of the ServiceManager, see Service Manager Service.

Right click one or more Agents and select Start to initiate them via the ServiceManager.

Stopping an Agent

Right-click one or more active Agents and select Stop to deactivate it. The agent stops immediately, however, processes that are currently running will continue.

Disconnecting the Agent

This option is available for active Agents.

When you start a new Communication Process and the Agents rearrange themselves to improve their workload balance, you may want to temporarily cut the connection between the Automation Engine and the Agents.

For this purpose, right-click one or more active Agents and select Disconnect Agent Connection. The Agents reconnect to the Automation Engine as soon as the next signal for Agent checking is sent.

Initiating Log Rotation

This option is available for active Agents.

The Automation Engine logs large amounts of information. To be able to handle your log files easily, you can define system-wide settings that break the information to be logged in smaller chunks and thus produce also smaller log files.

For example, you can determine the maximum size of the log file; or you can specify the number of days that may elapse before a new file starts. You do so in the UC_SYSTEM_SETTINGS variable using the CHANGE_LOGGING_DAYS and CHANGE_LOGGING_MB keys. For more information, see CHANGE_LOGGING Parameters and UC_SYSTEM_SETTINGS - Systemwide Settings.

You can also change the log settings via the Automic Web Interface. For this purpose, right-click one or more records and select Initiate Log Rotation; this causes a new log file to be written. A dialog prompts you to confirm your action.

Updating the Service Manager Link

Prerequisite: Enable the relevant ports in your firewall, so that the server processes will be able to connect to the ServiceManager. You have to use the ports defined in the INI file of the ServiceManager, see Service Manager Service.

This option is available for active Agents.

To be able to start Agents either manually from the Administration perspective or via the script element MODIFY_SYSTEM using a ServiceManager, the connection settings between Agent and ServiceManager must be up-to-date. There can be situations in which this is not the case, for example, it can happen that the service name which has been entered in the Agent object does not comply with the corresponding service name in the ServiceManager anymore.

Right-click one or more Agents and select Update Service Manager Link to refresh their ServiceManager connection settings. Alternatively, you can enter the relevant values manually in the Service Manager section of the Agent definition page. For more information, see Agents (HOST).

Replacing Agents

This option is available for active and inactive Agents, provided no tasks are running on them.

You can replace an Agent with another one of the same type and have the new Agent take over all tasks immediately. All references to the replaced agent are automatically changed in the settings of the objects that use it.

Important! Replacing Agents does not work for Scripts. After automatically replacing an Agent using this function, you still have to replace the references to the Agent(s) in Scripts manually.

To Replace the References to an Agent in Objects

  1. Right-click the Agent that must be replaced and select Replace.
  2. The Replace Agent dialog is displayed.

    The list in the lower part of the dialog displays all objects in which the selected Agent is being used.

  3. From the Replacement dropdown list select the Agent with which you want to replace it.
  4. By default all objects are selected; if you leave it so, the reference to the "old" Agent will be replaced with the "new" one in all of them.

    If you do not want to replace the Agent in all the objects but only in some of them, do one of the following:

    • Deactivate the checkbox in the table header; this deselects all checkboxes. Now activate the checkboxes next to the objects in which you want to replace the Agent.
    • Deactivate the checkboxes next to the objects in which you do not want to replace the Agent.
  5. When replacing an Agent with a different one, you may want to also modify some of the other settings of the affected objects. For this purpose, select one or more object in the list and click Open in new Window. This opens the definition pages of the selected objects in a new browser window each.
  6. Click the Replace button.

If you select an Agent Group in the Replacement dropdown list, all Agent Groups in the list below are disabled because it is not possible to assign an Agent group to another Agent Group.

See also: