When you create a Secure Agent, it is added to its own group by default. You can add multiple agents to one Secure Agent group. All agents within a group must be of the same type, for example, all agents that run within your network or all agents that run on Amazon EC2 machines.
Add multiple agents to a group to achieve the following goals:
Balance the workload across machines.
Add multiple agents to a group to balance the distribution of tasks across machines. When the runtime environment is a Secure Agent group with multiple agents, the group dispatches a task or a background process such as metadata call to an agent with the fewest number of tasks running or queued.
Improve scalability for connections and tasks.
When you create a connection or task, you select the runtime environment to use. If the runtime environment is a Secure Agent group with multiple agents, the tasks can run if any Secure Agent in the group is up and running. You do not need to change connection or task properties when you add or remove an agent or if an agent in the group stops running.
When you add multiple agents to a group, ensure that all of the Secure Agents are of the same type. For example, your organization installs four Secure Agents on physical machines within your network and two Secure Agents on Amazon EC2 machines. You can create a Secure Agent group that contains some or all of the local agents and a different group that contains the EC2 agents. Do not create a group that contains both a local agent and an EC2 agent.
If you need to access output files on the Secure Agent machine, you can view the job details to determine which Secure Agent ran the task. To view job details, open Monitor, select All Jobs, and click the job name.