What if you’re not sure which RES Wisdom Agent to schedule a job to?

One of our new colleagues over at R&D had a test environment that contained two machines that were almost identical but, for testing purposes, could never be online simultaneously. So he always had to shut down the one machine before he could fire up the other. He has a task that needs to be executed on one of those machines. It doesn’t really matter which one because the task makes use of a connector to make changes on a Domain or Exchange Server, whatever. He complained that he couldn’t schedule the job because he never knew in advance which of the two machines would be up.

RES Wisdom has a very simple solution for that. All he has to do is create a Run Book with that task and after assigning the task to both Agents he needs to enable the option ‘Run on one of the specified Agents’. This way RES Wisdom will see to it that the job will be executed on the Agent that is online and/or not busy with other RES Wisdom tasks.

This is a rather simple example but it points out that this particular option can be very powerful. There are situations where it doesn’t matter who performs the task as long as it is done, preferably without any delay.

Here’s another example. You have a task that manages Active Directory users. You have a connector in place and you have several machines that have the Admin Tools for AD installed and are capable of performing the task. You are never certain which of those machines are online or busy performing other tasks and you don’t care who does it as long as it’s done. Well, here you go, place all applicable Agents in a team and create a job in a Run Book that performs the task on that entire team. With the ‘Run on one of the specified Agents’ option enabled you have created an Agent pool for that task, the first available Agent will pick it up.