Hi. I’m having trouble understanding what features/capabilities an agent provides over a full blown server. I know agents do not require an additional license while adding additional servers does require a license.
I see we can add agents to event hubs under APIs. Are they only usable for executing API’s? What i’m looking for is providing multiple servers on which to execute scheduled scripts under automation. Does that require a second server and license?
Agents currently only support event hub events and commands. There are plans to bring more support for direct execution and scheduling of jobs but that is not yet supported. I know more folks are starting to use agents to fan out jobs and commands but they require a special script to invoke these events.
For integrated scheduling and execution, you currently need a separate server and license.
An example of how we’re using Event Hubs and agents is that with some of our clients we don’t have direct access to some of their network infrastructure (such as to manage their firewall and collect configuration backups) so, rather than poking holes to give us access publicly or build a site-to-site tunnel between our edge and their edge, we have an Event Hub agent installed on their management server, and we can then send commands to it through the PSU server to have it make some calls to the firewalls’ XML APIs to gather the configuration output. This command is contained in a variable on the PSU side so that the result of the API query from the agent will be received on the PSU side for further processing.
As the way this is designed is fairly generic, we could do any number of things through the agent, such as sending it commands, dumping a script into a variable to send over to the agent for it to run locally (assuming any required PowerShell modules have been installed already that the script(s) will need to use), trigger a script that’s already on the management server, etc.
That’s very interesting and makes me think there could be some nifty use cases for agents. I’ll need to put more thought into that.
for now it seems I need a second server so I can somewhat load balance jobs across two servers. but i’m going to look into use cases for agents as well.