Tidal Automation Overview

The purpose of this guide is to help you get started using Tidal Automation (TA) after you’ve installed it using the Tidal Automation Installation and Configuration. This guide provides information about getting help if you have problems, how to help yourself, the basics of starting or stopping components, and some of the basic tasks you perform when you start using TA to schedule and monitor jobs.

Note: Before you start to work through this document, use the Tidal Automation Installation and Configuration to install TA.

About Tidal Automation

Tidal Automation is an automation platform for cross-application and cross-platform enterprise workloads, batch job scheduling, and data and application integration. Tidal Automation can easily configure and run scheduled batch workloads and event-based business processes, integrate the commercial and custom applications these processes use, and determine which tasks to run, as well as where and when to run them, without the need to manage scripts or customize existing tools. Additionally, Tidal Automation provides a single view and point of control over business processes and the jobs they comprise.

Based on a highly scalable multi-tier Java architecture, Tidal Automation can scale to deliver the most demanding SLAs, because it is capable of handling hundreds of concurrent users, managing thousands of connections, and running hundreds of thousands of jobs a day. Tidal Automation offers a distributed management architecture that works across many popular OS platforms and integrates with major enterprise applications and technologies.

Tidal Automation can also manage complex application integrations that connect through web services and enterprise service bus (ESB) protocols. Tidal Automation can be implemented quickly, allowing users to maximize time to value, build momentum across their organizations, and quickly simplify their entire workload processing environment.

Tidal Automation Components

As described in the Tidal Automation Installation Guide, a basic TA system is composed of a number of required, optional, and 3rd-party components as shown here:

For the purposes of this document which is focused on giving you the basic information you need to get started and be successful with TA, the components you will be working with are the TA Web, the Primary Master, the Client Manager, and the Agents and Adapters. A brief description of these components is described below. See the Tidal Automation Installation and Configuration for descriptions of all components.

Master (or Primary Master)

The Master is the primary TA component that conducts all scheduling tasks. You can have one or more Masters in your network. The Master can be installed on either the Windows platform or the Unix platform. The basic functionality of TA remains the same regardless of the platform of the Master.

Each Master computer must supply a unique port number to which Client Managers connect. This port number ensures that communication between the Client Manager and Master is clear.

Client Manager

The Client Manager allows the Master to achieve higher performance and scalability. The purpose of the Client Manager is to service requests from user initiated activities, such as through the TA Web Client, Tidal Automation Transporter and from other external sources that utilize the Command Line Interface (CLI) or published TA Web services. The Client Manager allows the TA Master to focus more capacity on core scheduling needs related to job execution and job compilations, while the Client Manager addresses demands from activities such as users viewing or configuring scheduling data and output. The Client Manager constantly syncs the information from the Master database into its own TESCache database that it then uses to provide all TA Web Client users with current information. Multiple Client Managers connected to the same Master can be deployed to address additional performance needs.

The Client Manager is required if you want to use the TA Web Client, the Transporter, the Command Line Interface (CLI), REST, or mobile applications.

TA Web Client

The TA Web Client is the main user interface for managing TA jobs, scheduling, connections, configuration, and so on. The TA Web Client connects to the Client Manager using a browser.

You can use the TA Web Client with the Master.

Agents

An agent is a separate installation of TA that runs jobs on behalf of the Master. Agents help you to automate the execution of jobs that you know need to be performed on a regular basis, Offloading jobs to agents frees the Master for intensive scheduling tasks such as production compiles. Agents exist for various platforms. The Windows Agent and the Unix Agent are the two most commonly used agents.

Each agent can connect to a Master by specifying the Master-to-agent communication port and the Master-to-agent file transfer port numbers.

Adapters

TA provides adapters for many software products to enable connectivity to and access by TA. The Master has an Adapter Host it uses to manage the adapters and is the interface that the adapters use to connect to the Master. Adapters are provided with the base TA installation but must be licensed. In some cases, adapters need to be installed or configured.