Creating new Environments & Agent Groups

Agent Groups are grouped in Environments. Environments are logical containers grouping Agent Groups based on different roles they have in a Process lifecycle. Environments have a set of settings defined based on the Environment. An Environment may contain one or more Agent Group.

In this guide, we'll look at how to create a new Environment to your Frends Tenant, and how to add an Agent Group to an Environment.

Requirements

In order to follow this guide and create new Environments and Agent Groups, Administrator permissions are required. However, the settings and options are available for viewing for everyone with at least Editor level permission or role in your Frends Tenant. Actually creating or editing the permissions will be blocked and result in an error.

Step by Step Tutorial Available

If you prefer more visual or interactive guidance on how to create Environments and/or Agent Groups, you can find a step-by-step walkthrough from your own environment's home page, under Onboarding by selecting "Tutorial 2b, Step 5: Environments & Agent Groups" tour.

How to create a new Environment to Frends

Head over to Administration > Environments menu from the main navigation to get started with managing the Environments and Agent Groups.

To create a new Environment, click on the New Environment button on top left of the view. Provide the Environment a name, such as Production or UAT, and click on Save changes.

Because Environments do not contain any centrally managed settings, name is the only adjustable value for them. Other settings and values, such as log level settings and Environment Variables, are connected to Environments, but most functionality will come through Agent Groups that are later added to the Environments.

There is also no limit on how many Environments you can have, so create as many as needed for your development pipeline and use case. However, depending on your subscription tier, there can be a limit on the number of Agents and Agent Groups, placing also a limit on how many Environments you can actually use.

How to create an Agent Group

After creating the Environment you will have the created Environment selected and its options shown, alongside possibility to create a new Agent Group into the Environment. You can also at any time open the Environment admin page and select the Environment to access this view.

Click on New Agent Group button to set up an Agent Group.

From the provided settings, Name is the only mandatory field to fill. It is recommended to name the Agent Group based on the deployment strategy used to deploy the Agents, such as Cloud, OnPremise or Internal.

Otherwise the default settings will work for general use.

If you want or need to use a SQL Server instead of provided SQLite database for the Agent's configuration, provide its connection string here as well.

From the advanced settings menu:

• Allow running test Processes: This will enable the testing feature for Tasks in Process Editor, so that tests can be executed in this Agent Group.

• Cross platform: Essentially all new Agent Groups should be cross platform enabled, in order to support the latest features. Non-cross platform Agent Groups are supported for legacy purposes only, and the Agents can only be installed on Windows OS. Cross platform Agents support installation on Windows and Linux OSes.

• Allow new agents to connect to Agent Group: If using a container platform, such as Kubernetes, that can dynamically spawn new Agents, enabling this setting will allow the Agents to automatically connect to this Agent Group without prior set up in the UI. For other deployment models this setting has no effect and should be left disabled.

Once you have adjusted the settings as necessary, click Save changes and you have an Agent Group ready for adding and installing Agents to it.