Learn about an on-premise agent

To understand the purpose of an on-premise agent, you should first understand what modes you can use to integrate data during a connection.

You have two options for integrating data:

• Cloud – connects to a publicly accessible server application
• On-premise – connects to a publicly inaccessible server that has an integrator.io agent installed on it.

If your application is inaccessible, you can still use two methods to connect:

• Whitelist integator.io IP addresses to allow integrator.io to connect to your application or database directly
• Use an on-premise agent to connect to your application or database – without whitelisting

The on-premise agent allows integration with all supported SQL databases, MongoDB, DynamoDB, REST, and HTTP connections.

What is an on-premise agent?

An on-premise agent is a Windows software program that runs on your server, typically behind the firewall and within the same network as the systems you want to connect to. It establishes a secure tunnel to connect to integrator.io. The on-premise agent server must use a 64-bit operating system. On-premise agents do not work on 32-bit operating systems.

The on-premise agent automatically checks for updates and upgrades your agent to the latest version. You must download and install the latest version of the agent (3.0.10 or higher) to take advantage of the auto-upgrade feature.

If you provide the same agent token to the new agent software, your existing connections that connect through that on-premise agent should work without interruption.

When should I use an on-premise agent?

You should only see the option to use an on-premise agent when you’re connecting to an application. Using an on-premise agent is the best way to connect integrator.io to your on-premise server application. Since the agent makes calls to integrator.io, there is no need to open holes in the firewall by whitelisting IP addresses. The default ports for HTTPS (443) and SSH (22) should be defined on outbound rules in the firewall.

Running instances of an agent

You can run only one instance of an agent on a machine. However, the same agent can be used to talk to multiple databases and applications on the same network as the agent.

For example, if you’re running SQL on two virtual machines (VM1 and VM2) and you’ve installed an integrator.io agent on VM1, your agent can access every SQL database on the same machine and any applications in the same network. Say you have an HTTP application running on VM2 and you want to create a connection. You can use the existing agent for that connection since VM1 and VM2 are on the same network.

So, as long as VM1 and VM2 are on the same network, you can access any application on both machines.

Note: To eventually run the agent as a Windows service your agent must be downloaded from version 3.0 or above of integrator.io. Your account is automatically updated every time there’s a release. Check out our release notes to learn more about what’s new and find out what version we’re on!