About Tidal Agents

Companies often need to provide centralized scheduling and administration of workloads that span different computing platforms, multiple machines, and multiple locations. Tidal Automation™ uses agents to run jobs on the platforms where they need to run.

A Tidal Automation network contains a primary instance called the TA Master and additional instances of Tidal Automation called agents. The TA Master manages the schedule. When a TA Master determines that a job should run, the TA Master sends a message to the TA agent to run the command or script on remote machines. The agent that receives the message, runs and monitors the job. Then it reports back the job’s exit code, and output to the TA Master when the job completes. The agent process is also responsible for monitoring file dependencies and file events for jobs.

Tidal Automation supports agents for these environments:

Windows (.NET)
Java-based

Unix and Linux

z/OS

OpenVMS

Himalaya

Platform support for agents is documented in Tidal Automation Compatibility Matrix. The agent-specific documentation is available for other platforms:

In a basic Tidal Automation network, the TA Master uses a centralized database containing all calendar and job scheduling information. One or more agent machines execute the production schedule. One or more client machines provide the TA user interface or console. The only prerequisite for the Master/agent relationship is that the machine acting as the Master must be on the same TCP/IP network as the machines serving as agents.

Agents:

Run on behalf of the TA Master
Monitor file events and dependencies
Communicate data back to the TA Master

Note: Tidal recommends that no more than five agents be run on the minimum hardware platform. However, the number of agents that can be run on a given server depends upon the CPU and memory resources available on the machine. To gauge the effect of agents on system performance, add a single agent at a time, assess performance, and add another agent as allowable.