Working with Workload Objects › Workload Objects › Agent Groups

Agent Groups

An agent group is an explicitly defined group of Windows or UNIX/Linux agents. You need to define agent groups to use load balancing or run a job on all agents in a group.

Suppose your CA Workload Automation DE setup has ten Windows agents and ten UNIX agents; you can define the following agent groups:

• two Windows agent groups of five agents each
• two UNIX agent groups of five agents each and one Windows agent group of three agents
• one UNIX agent group of four agents, and two Windows agent groups of two agents and three agents each

These are just some of the combinations you can define; you can define any such combinations to suit your requirements, the only requirement being that you must group agents of the same operating system together.

Note: An agent group is an explicitly defined entity. For instance, all the agents of your setup do not implicitly constitute an agent group.

Important! When you define agent groups to use load balancing, we recommend that you select either the random or round robin criteria.

If you select the CPU load balancing criteria, we recommend that you define at most 15 agents in the agent group. Otherwise, the performance of your system might be impacted.

If you delete an agent group that is enabled with CPU load balancing, stale messages are sometimes sent continuously from the agents of the deleted agent group to the server. These stale messages might impact the performance of the server. After deleting an agent group, search the trace log in the server installation directory for LOADBALANCINGCPUMONITOR messages. If you find LOADBALANCINGCPUMONITOR messages in the trace log, restart the agents that are sending stale messages.