ODI Series Part 2 - The Agent

Ok, so ODI is installed so we are now going to look at setting up an agent.

An agent is a java service that acts a listener on a designated tcp/ip port, the agent allows execution of sessions such as model reverses, packages, scenarios and interfaces, you will learn about more of these later.

You can set an agent up to run as a windows services or from a batch script, I am going to show both methods.

First of all you need to locate and edit the file odiparams.bat that resides in the ODI bin directory.



The section you need to update is after
rem
rem Repository Connection Information
rem

Update the Driver and URL to match your ODI repository you should be used to doing this now.
The username and password are account details for the Master repository, you notice you have to enter an encoded password, and there is a batch utility in the bin directory that will encode passwords for you.



Update the ODI_SECU_WORK_REP to match the name of your work repository that you set up in the topology manager.

You can leave the ODI_USER and pass alone if you have not changed the security for ODI.


To start the agent you will just need to create a simple batch script.


The port can be set to anything you like as long as you know it won’t conflict with anything else. Next add another script to stop the agent



Before you can start the agent a few more additional configurations are required in the topology manager.

First you will need to insert an agent and give it a name, enter the host and the port you defined in the batch script.



You can’t actually test yet as the agent is not running.

Next I am going to create a context, a context is basically a way of grouping different components together, so you can have say a development context which will bring together certain technologies, databases, applications and agents.
There is already a global context available but I like to always set extra ones up for flexibility, the context section can be accessed from the second tab



Finally a logical agent needs to be created which defines the link between the agent and the context.



Once this is completed you should be able to start up the agent.



Just to be sure the agent is actually working you can go back and test it from the topology manager.



Well that’s all well and fine but some people like to have everything running as a windows service, as long as you have updated the odiparams.bat then it is simple.




Just make sure you create the service with the same physical agent name and the same port as you set up in the topology manager.
You can check the service is running by opening the agentservice.log in the bin directory.

One thing to watch out for is that if you ODI_JAVA_HOME is set to a directory with spaces, if you are just using the default install then you will be fine otherwise you will need to add quotes to the java config in the odiparams.bat file.

set ODI_JAVA_EXE=%ODI_JAVA_HOME%\bin\java.exe
set ODI_JAVAW_EXE=%ODI_JAVA_HOME%\bin\javaw.exe
set ODI_JAVAC_EXE=%ODI_JAVA_HOME%\bin\javac.exe

To 

set ODI_JAVA_EXE="%ODI_JAVA_HOME%\bin\java.exe"
set ODI_JAVAW_EXE="%ODI_JAVA_HOME%\bin\javaw.exe"
set ODI_JAVAC_EXE="%ODI_JAVA_HOME%\bin\javac.exe"

Once the service has been installed remove the quotes

Well that completes another session, next time I will looking at configuring the topology manager to point to a planning application, essbase database, file directory and sql database tables before we move on to the designer.