System Configurations

Tidal Automation is used to schedule and manage jobs on several different systems – even different operating systems – through a single operator station. This single point-of-control means that you need only TA Web client on your PC to manage jobs across multiple systems. Masters are the central point for scheduling jobs on associated agents. Tidal Automation jobs can only run on licensed agents.

Master

The master is the Windows or UNIX system on which you install the “brains” of your Tidal Automation network. You interact with the master using the TA Web client. The master performs the requested service on a local or remote agent, and then returns updated information to the TA Web client which displays the results.

The master launches jobs on machines licensed as agents. An agent is software on another machine in the same network as the master, and runs jobs on behalf of the master. The TA Web client does not connect directly to the agent, but schedules and manages its jobs through the master.

ClientManager

Two main components of the Tidal Automation architecture are the Master and Client Manager. Client Manager allows TA to achieve higher performance and scalability needs. The purpose of the Client Manager is to service requests from user initiated activities, such as through the TA Web Client, TA Transporter and from other external sources that utilize the Command Line Interface (CLI) or published TA Web services. 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 such activities as RSS feeds and users viewing or configuring scheduling data and output. A single Client Manager is mandatory and additional Client Managers can be deployed to address additional performance needs.

Agents

The agent is any machine that runs jobs on behalf of a Tidal Automation master. The master and the agent communicate with each other to execute jobs remotely. Multiple Tidal Automation agents provide greater production reliability should the master become unavailable for some reason.

Job commands that run on the agent should be accessible to the agent machine on your network. They are scheduled on the master, and initiated on the agent by the master when schedule dependencies are satisfied.

Agents operate independently from the master. This allows continued processing of any work that is already sent by the master if either the master schedule or the common shared network becomes unavailable. The agent relays the results of the job it continued processing when either the network connection or the master is available again.