Defining a PeopleSoft Agent List

You can assign jobs to run using PeopleSoft agent lists similar to the way you assign them to individual agents. With PeopleSoft lists, however, you have access to useful functions not available with individual connections. You can specify alternate connection(s) to run your jobs if the primary connection is unavailable, you can balance the workload of many jobs among the process servers in the list, or you can broadcast jobs to run on all the servers in the list at the same time.

To define a PeopleSoft Agent list:

1. Click Definitions in the Navigation pane > Agent Lists > PeopleSoft to display the PeopleSoft Agent Lists pane.

2. Right-click the PeopleSoft Agent Lists pane and click Add Agent List.

   OR

   Click Add on the TA toolbar to display the Agent List Definition dialog.

   

3. Enter the name of the adapter list (up to 60 characters) in the List Name field,

   In the Parent List field, you can click a parent list if you want to create nested lists.

   If you specify a parent list, the list you are editing will be a child list of the parent and will appear below its parent in the list hierarchy.

4. Choose the type of list from the List Type list based on how you want your jobs to be assigned to a PeopleSoft connection in the list.

   • Ordered – In support of high-availability, TA chooses the first available agent to run the job based on the order that the connections appear in the Agents Selected section. For example, if the first (primary) connection in the list is not available, TA tries the second (alternative) connection in the list. You might want to use this list type for critical jobs where multiple connections are capable of processing the request.

   • Random – Chooses connections from the Agents Selected field randomly. This is a crude form of workload balancing. For more advanced load balancing, you should choose the Balanced option.

   • Rotation – TA cycles through the list of connections in the Agents Selected field and launches jobs assigned to that list in rotation. When the end of the list is reached, the first connection in this list is chosen. This is a form of workload balancing where you can predict where the next job will run.

   • Balanced – TA chooses a connection from the Agents Selected section based on lightest load when the job is ready to launch. The Balanced Agent list uses PeopleSoft connection load information to decide which connection in the list gets to run a job when its dependencies are met. You can choose this option to balance your workload across all the available connections in the list.

     PeopleSoft uses the formula for calculating load information for a PeopleSoft connection:

     Number of Active Processes = Process requests that have a status of either Pending, Queued, Initiated, or Processing.

     Number of Max API Aware Concurrent Processes Defined For This Server = A field in PeopleSoft containing the configured limit for a process server. See PeopleTools > Process Scheduler > Servers to view the configured limit.

   • Broadcast – TA runs the job on every connection in the Agents Selected section. For example, you can use this option to schedule a maintenance process on each machine in the list using the same job.

5. Highlight the appropriate PeopleSoft connection from the Agents Available section on the List tab.

6. Click left arrow to add the selected connection to the list by moving it from the Agents Available section to the Agents Selected section. You can also drag and drop connections from one section to another.

   Note: Most adapter lists will refer to different process servers associated with the same database instance; this means that all processes and run control definitions will be available no matter which connection is selected for the job. If multiple databases are associated with the connections in the same list, they must mirror the processes, run controls and security for the jobs to run successfully.