Agents are responsible for running all Automate MFT tasks such as file transfers, processes, and workflow orchestration. They provide the flexibility to execute operations either on your own infrastructure (self-hosted agents) or in the cloud (Progress-hosted agents), allowing organizations to align deployment with their security, compliance, and operational requirements.

There are two main types of agents:
  • Self-Hosted Agents: Installed and operated on your servers or virtual machines, giving you full control over the execution environment.
  • Progress-Hosted Agents: Hosted and managed by Progress, requiring no local installation.

Agent pools ensure task execution continues even if an individual agent becomes unresponsive or loses connectivity. When this occurs, other available agents in the pool automatically assume the workload.

Agent Pools allow you to group multiple self-hosted agents to support distributed task execution, load balancing, and simplified task management. Instead of assigning a task to a specific agent, you can assign it to a pool. Automate MFT will automatically choose the most suitable available agent in that pool when the task runs.

Centralized management

Agents and agent pools are centrally managed, monitored, and assigned to tasks during task creation or editing. An agent or agent pool can be assigned to multiple tasks.

Agent assignment

When you create a task, you must select which agent or agent pool will execute it.

Quick view

The Details panel appears on the right side of the interface when an agent or agent pool is selected from the list. It provides a concise summary of the agent or agent pool details and task usage information.