The PROCESIO on-premises Agent or for short OnPrem Agent is a software application that can run both on Linux or Windows operating systems that monitor commands (further on called Tasks) sent by a process action from a PROCESIO process, executes the command, and gives back feedback on the result of the executed command so that it can be available in the process.

The current mechanism works as described in the following image:



Step 1: Install and configure the OnPrem Agent

The OnPrem Agent is a stand-alone application that needs to be copied on a remote machine where you want to execute commands from a PROCESIO process and then configured to run at the operating system startup. The agent is written in .Net6 C#.

1. Download the OnPremAgent_Net6_1.0.3.zip file and extract its contents in the location you want to install the agent into

The file contents are as follows:

2. Edit the following files:

• PROCESIO_agent_settings.txt

The content of this file is as follows:

Please change the value of the “SecretAgentKey” with some random complicated secret key. You need to write the secret key immediately after the “:“. If you write for example:

The secret key will be “ ThisI$0ran40mK3y“, so it will contain a space.

If the internet connection on the machine where you install the agent runs through a proxy, then you can add an additional parameter where you can set up the proxy server through you what the agent to connect to the internet:

3. Only for Linux - pre-requisites

Before running the agent on Linux environments please make sure you have the operating system up to date and the dotNet6 from Microsoft installed. To do that, please execute the following commands in the Terminal:

// Update OS
sudo apt upgrade -y
sudo apt upgrade --fix-missing

//Install dot net 6
wget https://packages.microsoft.com/config/ubuntu/20.04/packages-microsoft-prod.deb
sudo dpkg -i packages-microsoft-prod.deb
sudo apt install -y dotnet-sdk-6.0
sudo apt install -y dotnet-runtime-6.0
dotnet --version

4. Starting the agent

• For Windows

Run the Agent_NetCore.exe file, directly or from the cmd:

1Agent_NetCore.exe

• For Linux:

Run the following command in the Terminal:

1dotnet Agent_NetCore.dll

5. Setting up the agent to run on OS startup

• For Windows

TBD

• For Linux

TBD

6. Getting the HOSTNAME

For Windows open the cmd and for Linux open the terminal and type:

1hostname

The result of this command will be used to configure the PROCESIO process that will execute commands on a certain agent.

Step 2: Configure a process to execute commands on-premises

You will have to navigate to https://procesio.app login to the platform using your credentials and set the workspace to the workspace you have shared with your colleagues



Go to the Process Designer menu and choose to Create new.

1. Configure the process & variables

Give a name to your process, such as:



Go to the Custom Actions tab in the Actions panel



You should be able to see the OnPrem Agent CMD and OnPrem Agent Get Result actions. Drag them on the canvas and connect the process as seen below:



Go to process variables:



Add the following variables as seen in the next image



For the purpose of this example, please populate the default values of the variables as follows:

• EndPoint: https://gefeeauth.azurewebsites.net/ProcesioAgentServer.php
• SecretKey: here you should put it exactly as you set up the SecretAgentKey in the PROCESIO_agent_settings.txt file from Step 1, 2. Edit the following files.
• AgentSSID: here you should put the HOSTNAME of the machine where the agent was installed. Please refer to Step 1, 6. Getting the HOSTNAME.

2. Configure the action “OnPrem Agent CMD“

Click on the action in the canvas and the action’s property panel will be displayed to the right of the screen.

You will notice that the action has 2 configuration tabs, as follows: Command and Configuration.





Please configure each of the tabs as follows:

• Configuration tab



The working directory parameter you can configure as you like, giving it a folder path on the machine where that agent runs. You can configure it as a variable or hard-coded, as you like. This parameter sets the working directory of the Command Prompt.

For time out (seconds) parameter if you set 0 or <0 values it will consider 600 seconds (10 minutes).

The task id parameter is an output parameter that returns the ID of the Task that was sent to the on-premise agent to execute. This parameter will be needed for the OnPrem Agent Get Result action.

• Command tab



In this section, you can either execute a file or execute commands. If you execute a file, the Commands to execute field will be ignored.

All fields in this section are optional.

If you execute a file, you can also add arguments for executing the specified file, by adding them in the Arguments for the file to execute field.

3. Configure the action “OnPrem Agent Get Results“

This action has only one tab (Configuration) and it has the following parameters:



The TaskId parameter which is an input for this action comes from the output of the OnPrem Agent CMD action.

4. Configure the Decisional

You need to configure the Decisional action so that if the task was not finished it should try again to check the status. We did this with this configuration:





RetriesAllowed > 0 means that the process should not try to get the result more than the number set in the variable RetriesAllowed. This condition prevents infinite loops.

TaskStatus = 0 OR TaskStatus = 1 means that the status of the task is ToExecute (0) or Executing (0) and for that reason, the process should use a delay action to wait some time before trying again to check the status.

5. Configure the Delay action

You need to configure the Delay action to be relevant to the task that you know you are running.



6. Configure the RetriesAllowed-- action

This action is a numerical Add operation action and it is intended to decrease by 1 the variable RetriesAllowed for every retry the process makes to get the result of the task. The purpose of this is to prevent infinite loops for tasks that might get stuck or take indefinite time to finish.



7. Save, Validate & Run the process

Now, you can save, validate & run the process.

Go to the instance of the process by clicking Check instance (it will be displayed for ~3 seconds after you run the process)



In the instance view, you will be able to see the outputs of the process:



In the DataResults output, it will be included all the information which is also visible if you were to execute those commands in a Command Prompt, except for the errors.

In the ErrorResults output, it will be included all the errors which come from executing the commands.

TaksLogs is a list of all the logs of the agent service if any. Generally, it will be in the case of errors inside the agent service.

TaskStatus will give the status of the task:

TaskID is the ID of the task sent to be executed by the agent.

Enjoy!