Hi Team,
By default, master agent use TCP interface for file downloads required by mapped agents/end points from respective master agent machine. In multi geo-location customer environment, master agent can be installed in branch locations to save bandwidth consumption which downloads files from SapphireIMS central server present in central/Data centre/Head office location and respective mapped agents present in branch location can download needed files from master agent present locally.
Following use cases are difficult to handle with TCP based communication and hence the need of HTTP/HTTPS interface support:
- Roaming assets like LAPTOPS tagged to master agent will not be always present in customer locations and when they are roaming(outside their network), they cannot communicate to respective master agent since master agent is not exposed to internet. Customer may not allow TCP based interface communication to be exposed over internet for security reasons.
- There is a fall back mechanism available where in if master agent is not reachable, as a fallback, tagged agents can download the files directly from central instance of SapphireIMS. However, customer may have limited bandwidth at central SapphireIMS instance and too many file downloads can cause bandwidth over-usage, master agent getting exposed to internet over HTTP/HTTPS comes to rescue where in roaming agents doesn’t have to reach central instance of SapphireIMS for any file downloads.
- From scalability point of view, since the TCP file server has limited capacity, may not serve more number of mapped agents to respective master agents and using HTTP/HTTPS based file server can scale more.
The standard operating procedure to configure the master agent with HTTP/HTTPS interface can be referred in attached doc Master File Server Configuration.docx (4.9 MB)
Note: This will be supported on SapphireIMS patch 5.7.1.1 and above.