Choosing the agents

What are the advantages of connecting agents directly over setting up domains? And when should standard agents be preferred to fault-tolerant ones?

The following table provides a set of guidelines to help you decide how to set up the distributed part of the end-to-end with fault tolerance capabilities network.
Table 1. Guidelines for choosing agent types
Using these agent types is best when you want to...
Standard agents in direct connection to the end-to-end server
  • Quickly migrate tracker agents.
  • Be sure that the status displayed in ISPF (menu 5.5) is the real one, since no intermediate agents can hinder the transmission of events to the end-to-end server. This is particularly important when you schedule jobs with centralized scripts, since the scripts are not downloaded to the agent unless it is properly linked.

    This applies also when a job uses special resources. If the agent is offline, the resource is allocated, but the job does not start until the agent is available again.

  • Manage jobs (with either centralized or non-centralized scripts) from the mainframe. An additional advantage is due to the fact that downloading the Symphony file takes less time, since standard agents use a reduced version of this file.
Fault-tolerant agents in direct connection to the end-to-end server
  • Take advantage of fault-tolerance. In addition, you can use conman locally to monitor how the plan is running.
  • Run primarily jobs with non-centralized scripts and can do without centralized control from the mainframe.
  • Be sure that the status displayed in ISPF (menu 5.5) is the real one, since no intermediate agents can hinder the transmission of events to the end-to-end server.
Domain managers with domains
  • Set up a complex network with many agents.
  • Rationalize the network topology by lines of business.
  • Guarantee more dependable fault-tolerance.
  • Use backup domain managers.
  • Make sure that problems affecting a part of the network are not extended to the entire network.
  • Reduce to the least possible the network down time while the Symphony file is downloaded. To do so, you can use the TOPOLOGY POSTPONE keyword in conjunction with the mm start tomserver local option on the domain managers.