Overview
Universal Automation Center is a system of two enterprise workload automation products:
Universal Controller
Universal Controller is the Universal Automation Center workload automation and job scheduling software. It provides the time-and-date scheduling of an enterprise job scheduler and the capabilities of a workload automation broker.
The Controller is a Java web application running in a Tomcat web container. Two or more instances of the Controller can be used in a Universal Automation Center system to provide a secure, High Availability environment.
The user interface of the Controller has been developed with an intuitive design that leverages the latest Web 2.0 technologies. It is accessible anywhere using most popular browsers. One hundred percent of user and administrative functions can be performed via the web interface.
A central component of the Controller is the integrated drag-and-drop workflow definition tool. This feature allows you to define workflows that closely model your business processes. While working within the workflow module, you can import existing task definitions or create new tasks on the fly. You can develop simple or complex workflows and zoom in or out to view the details or overview as required. When the workflow kicks off, you can monitor its activity in a table view or graphically or both. You can create your own activity displays, specifying which activity you want selected and what details should be included. Like the workflow itself, the activity display is completely customizable.
Universal Agent
Together with Universal Data Mover, Universal Agent (using Universal Command as its core component) forms a common Agent (a single code base to install) that handles both managed file transfers and your enterprise workload automation.
On this website, the terms Universal Agent and Agent most often refer to this common Agent.
Universal Agent is a vendor-independent scheduling agent that collaborates with existing job scheduler(s) on all major computing platforms, both legacy and distributed. All schedulers that run on z/Series, i/Series, UNIX, Linux, or Windows are supported.
It simplifies your infrastructure with a single automation agent for multiple automation tasks.
Universal Agent can be deployed on your job scheduler server and on each machine in your environment where you need to execute batch workloads. The Agent is scheduled as a local task within your scheduler and communicates across your network to control the execution of work. Status and output are reported back to the job scheduler server in real time.
Communication across your network is implemented using SSL standards. This provides a secure and reliable network infrastructure for job scheduling across all of you platforms.
Agents can manage workloads from more than one scheduler at the same time. This allows you to consolidate to a single standard for all of your scheduling agents, greatly simplifying the task of deploying and maintaining job scheduling agents on all of your servers.
Universal Agents provide the capability to directly integrate with your applications using a variety of web services protocols, initiating and monitoring application processes using SOAP, HTTP(s), JMS, and MQSeries protocols.