IBM Sterling Agent Architecture - an overview

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 IBM Sterling Agent is a time triggered transaction that performs a variety of individual functions, automatically and at specific time intervals. It is not triggered by conditions, events or user input. Agent can be configured to trigger automatically at specific time interval or it can be triggered manually and uses JMS queues to read and write messages.

The agent fetches the work to be done in batches. It completes processing one batch or records and fetches the next eligible batch for processing.

1.Agent is triggered (manually through triggeragent.sh or automatically based on trigger interval )

2. getJobs (trigger) message is posted to JMS queue by agent trigger

3. getJobs() method reads the above message .Within getJobs() method, agent tries to acquire lock on YFS_OBJECT_LOCK table for agent Criteria ID

If lock is not available then getJobs() method exits and does nothing. This prevents multiple threads from running getJobs at the same time.

4. If lock is available then getJobs() method fetches first batch of eligible records which needs to be processed.

5. The above records posted as execute message to JMS queue

6. After the execute messages, one getJobs message is posted with last record key.

7. execute method picks execute message one by one and processes them.

8. After all the execute messages are consumed then only getJobs message is left in queue

9. getJobs() method picks up the getJobs message left in the queue and fires the query for the next batch of eligible records using the last record key processed.

10.Continues the above process till all the eligible records are fetched and processed

11.It then waits to be triggered manually or is triggered automatically based on the Trigger interval

12.Upon receiving the trigger, agent will start processing again and go through the same flow.

For more details on the agent architecture with an example of the whole process, refer to -

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg27036361&aid=1