All you ever wanted to know about Topology Builder agents - Issue #1 - The basics

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Do you ever wonder what all those Topology Builder agents are and what they are doing with the TADDM data? If so, you have come to the right place. This is the first post in a series where I will attempt to document most of the Topology Builder agents.  

To start off, I wanted to provide a brief overview of the topology builder agent grouping. In TADDM 7.2.1.4+  there are 4 types of topology agents;

1. Dependency agents - By default, these run every 30 minutes since the end of the last run if no other group is running. Most of the agents in this group are building dependencies between objects. To learn more about dependencies see this link;

http://pic.dhe.ibm.com/infocenter/tivihelp/v46r1/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.ibm.taddm.doc_7.2.2%2FSDKDevGuide%2Fc_cmdbsdk_modelobject_dependencies.html

In addition to dependency creation, this group also includes agents that;

- consolidate computer systems
- rename objects if the current name can be enhanced.
- build out the objects in business apps that were created via MQL in grouping composer.
- build out business apps for host app descriptors


2. Cleanup Agents - By default, these run every 4 hours since the end of the last run if no other group is running. These agents are responsible for cleaning  data in the database, which could be removing old aliases, correcting alias and persobj entries and maintaining the aliases_jn table. There is also a new agent RegistrationInfoAgent that logs healthcheck and other data to log/taddm.info for Support.

3. Background agents - By default, these run every 4 hours since the end of the last run if no other group is running.  These agents are very similar to the cleanup agents, these also perform database cleanup tasks such as cleaning up old runtime processes, fixing tables that are split for a class(eg. appssrvr/appsdb2) if the data is missing in one, not the other. There is also an agent in this group that cleans up redundant AppServer instances that have corresponding Oracle or Sybase servers. There is one dependency agent in this group, HostDependencyAgent, this agent handles the construction of system dependencies between application servers/server processes and computer systems.

4. Integration agent - By default, these run every hour since the end of the last run if no other group is running. For 7214 this is only the OSLCAgent which is for integration with Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) platforms


Last of all, if you ever need to run topology agents manually, see this technote for details;

/support/pages/node/726285


Next up? AliasesCleanupAgent will be the first agent I will discuss in more detail.  For a complete list of all Topo agents that I have blogged about, use this link to find them;

https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/blogs/home/tags/topobuilder%20taddmsupport?lang=en

If you are interested in other specific agents please comment below.