SAS/CONNECT User's Guide

Introduction

Agent services is used with compute services and messaging services to provide client/server based task management for the nodes across your network. An agent is SAS source code that is launched by the DOMAIN server to support the execution of a task. After the task has finished executing, an agent may be designed to send a completion notification to a message queue for the client application, or the client can simply check the DOMAIN server to see if the agent has completed execution.

The source that composes an agent may be predefined and stored with the DOMAIN server, or the source may be defined dynamically with the request for the agent to execute.

Client/server-based agents provide the following types of services:

distributed agent processing
periodic agent processing
conditional agent processing
parallel agent processing.

These services can be used together to maximize the flexibility and functionality of a client/server application. For example, using agent services, an application can be designed to execute autonomously on a periodic basis. The application can make conditional decisions to satisfy its goals, which includes submitting other processes for execution on various hosts on the network.

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