CA WA Agent file monitoring on NFS or remote share

Products

• Workload Automation Agent
• DSERIES- SERVER
• CA Workload Automation DE - System Agent (dSeries)

Issue/Introduction

CA WA Agent can have issues when monitoring files over NFS or a remote share.

When monitoring files over the network, it is very important to make sure network has minimum latency possible, preferably from few to 10's milliseconds.
Also, doing extensive wildcard monitoring can have an impact.  Apart from network bottleneck, the NFS performance can degrade due to busy disk.  The NFS requests are usually random, this means lower locality of reference and results in busy disk.

Environment

CA WA System Agent 
OS: Linux or Windows

Resolution

There several setting available in the  CA WA Agent that help process the file monitoring jobs.  If an Agent has large number of file monitoring jobs, and most are over network, then add this parameter to the agentparm.txt.

filemonplugin.dispatcher.processors=-1

This allows the agent to create a processor thread for each job.  Normally they are shared, by default 10 per thread.  The above setting will create as many thread as the monitor jobs.

Additional Information

Note:  The CA WA Agent depends on the network and local resources.  If the network has excessive bottleneck and latency, then any settings change on the CA Agent will not improve performance.