Remote Agents

Some work you want to perform requires resources (e.g., data sources or running bots) that you do not want to expose to the outside world. Placed behind a firewall, these resources are secure but inaccessible from your processes. Remote agents provide a secure connection to those resources so work can be performed locally and the results sent back to process automation securely.

Remote agents consist of queues and workers. Workers are installed on your local machine and make requests for work by calling process automation. The queues schedule the work. Each work item is added to a queue. When the worker is able to perform work, it requests work from the remote agent. The remote agent then sends queued work items (if available) to the worker. When the worker completes the work items, it returns them to the remote agent and requests more work from the remote agent.

Each customer can have at most two remote agents. Remote agents will be disabled when specific inactivity conditions are met.

Using Remote Agents

Remote agents can be used in conjunction with external data sources, web services, and running bots. You can register a worker on a computer in your organization's network to perform data queries or run bots. For example, if your remote agent has a queue with the data query plugin, you can use that remote agent's workers to query data sources in your organization's network.

When you create an external data source, you have an option to specify the remote agent associated with it. For bots, a dedicated bot remote agent has been created for you.

Creating a Remote Agent

Remote agents are created in the Integrations page in Process Automation.

Note: You do not need to create a remote agent for running bots. One has already been created for you. You will need to install an associate workers with the dedicated remote agent bot to run bots via a timer starting event or the Invoke Bot activity in Workflow.

Warning: Ensure you are using remote agent workers that are version 11.7.2405.42009 or higher. Learn how to determine your remote agent worker's version.

  1. On the Integrations page, click Remote Agents in the left pane. A list of existing remote agents will appear.
  2. Click New to create a new remote agent.
  3. Enter a name and description for your remote agent.
  4. Click Create. This takes you to a configuration page where you can create queues, add plugins, and create workers.

Monitoring a Remote Agent

  1. On the Integrations page, click Remote Agents in the left pane.
  2. Select a remote agent.
  3. In the left pane, you can see
    • Queues: The queues associated with the agent, including how many items are in a queue, and which workers are assigned for a queue. For the Dedicated Bot Remote Agent, you can also review the queue's capabilities.
    • Workers: The workers assigned to the agent including their machine names, statuses, and versions.
    • History: The work that has been completed and queued for the agent, as well as any errors.

Relevant Ports

Process Automation communicates with workers using port 443. The machines hosting the worker agents do not need SSL certificates for this communication.

When using the data query plugin, the workers communicate with databases using TCP port 1433.

Next Steps