Populating the agent depot

The agent depot is an installation directory on the monitoring server from which you deploy agents and maintenance packages across your environment. Before you can deploy any agents from a monitoring server, you must first populate the agent depot with bundles. A bundle is the agent installation image and any prerequisites.

When you add a bundle to the agent depot, you need to add the bundle that supports the operating system to which you want to deploy the bundle. For example, if you have a Windows Tivoli Enterprise Monitoring Server and Web Response Time agent on Linux and you want to remote configure the Linux agent, the Tivoli Enterprise Monitoring Server must have the Web Response Time Linux package in the depot. (If you are installing from different media for each platform type, for example, Windows, AIX® and Solaris, HP-UX, Linux, you need to add the bundle from the specific platform media for the component.)

You can have an agent depot on each monitoring server in your environment or share an agent depot, as described in Sharing an agent depot across your environment. If you choose to have an agent depot for each monitoring server, you can customize the agent depot based on the types of bundles that you want to deploy and manage from that monitoring server. For example, if you have a monitoring server dedicated to monitoring with Web Response Time agents, populate the depot with Web Response Time-related agent bundles. If you deploy an agent from a remote monitoring server, you must have a agent bundle in the depot available to the monitoring server.

Note: Agent depots cannot be located on a z/OS® monitoring server.

There are two methods to populate an agent depot:

Populating the agent depot from the installation image
- Populating the agent depot during installation: Windows
- Populating the agent depot during installation: Linux and UNIX
Populating an agent depot with the tacmd addBundles command

You can use the installation image to populate the agent depot only when you are populating the depot with bundles for the same operating system as your monitoring server. For example, you can use the installation image to add a bundle for a Windows agent to a Windows monitoring server, but you cannot use the Linux installation image to add a Linux bundle to a Windows monitoring server. If you need to add bundles for operating systems other than that used by your monitoring server, use the tacmd addBundles command, as described in Populating an agent depot with the tacmd addBundles command.

Note:

Only Tivoli-provided product agent bundles should be loaded into the IBM® Tivoli® Monitoring deployment depot. User-provided or customized bundles are not supported. Use only Tivoli provided tacmd commands to process bundles and to execute agent deployments. Manual manipulation of the depot directory structure or the bundles and files within it is not supported and may void your warranty.