Questions on Agent Groups

[Klaus Lintz]

HI Community
I received some questions from a customer regarding agent groups

1. When the batch servers are configured in HA, our understanding is CA Automic agent will be configured on each batch server. These agents will be part of an Agent group.

1. In this case what is the direction of communication between Scheduler server and agent – is it from agent to server  or bidirectional ?
2. How does the heart beat (health check) works ? Is it a Push (Agent communicates the health to Scheduler) or Pull  (Scheduler monitors the agents health) configuration ?
3. In case of a node failure, how does the request gets routed ?

1. 1. 1. If the node failure happens in between processing of a CA Automic workflow, what will happen to it ? Does it need any manual intervention to make it complete?
      2. If a node fails, will next workflow in the queue gets assigned to the available node ?
2. Is there any diagram/documentation which we can refer to understand how the control flows or requests gets load-balanced with Agent Groups?

Your feedback will greatly appreciated
Regards
Klaus

[Markus Embacher]

Hi Klaus,
you can create HOSTG objects to group agents. This will not be done by the system automatically. Agent Groups can contain one or many agents. You can use an Agent Group in a Job instead of an agent. An Agent Group has a Mode: Any, First, Next listed, Load dependent, all active, all active and inactive. Based on the mode a job executes on one or many agents in the the Agent Group.

1a) using an Agent Group does not change the communication behavior. The connection is initiated by the Agent and from then on it is bidirectional
1b) the agent checks it's connection to the CP using the settings in UC_HOSTCHAR_DEFAULT / KEEP_ALIVE
1c) it depends on the settings: if you want a failed job to be restarted automatically then you can set that up in the post conditions of the workflow task. When using an agent group in Mode "any" then the restarted job will be executed automatically on another active agent within the agent group.
2) some docu links:
https://docs.automic.com/documentation/webhelp/english/AA/12.3/DOCU/12.3/Automic%20Automation%20Guides/help.htm#AWA/Objects/obj_agent_group.htm
https://docs.automic.com/documentation/webhelp/english/AA/12.3/DOCU/12.3/Automic%20Automation%20Guides/help.htm#AWA/Workflows/wf_AgentGroupSetting.htm

Regards, Markus