Working with the agent

This section describes the LoadRunner Agent.

Overview

The LoadRunner Agent runs on the load generators and enables communication between the Controller, Load Generators, and MI Listeners (in over firewall configurations).

The agent receives instructions from the Controller to initialize, run, pause, and stop Vusers. At the same time, the agent also relays data on the status of the Vusers back to the Controller.

Run the agent as a process

In some cases, running GUI Vusers on remote machines, or terminal sessions, the agent must run as a process.

To change the LoadRunner Agent from a service to a process:

On the host machine, select OpenText Professional Performance Engineering > Tools > Agent Runtime Settings Configuration from the Start menu, and select Manual log in to this machine.

Run the agent as a service

In most cases, the agent runs as a service.

To change the agent from a process to a service:

On the host machine, select OpenText Performance Engineering > Tools > Agent Runtime Settings Configuration from the Start menu.
Select Allow virtual users to run on this machine without user login, and enter a valid user name and password.

Configure the agent on load generator machines

When working with protocols that use network files or Web protocol Vusers that access the Internet through a proxy server, the Load Generator agent must have network permissions. Note that the default user created by OpenText Enterprise Performance Engineering, System, does not have network permissions.

By default, the agent runs as a service on the Load Generator machines. You can either run the agent as a process or you can continue running the agent as a service. To continue running the agent as a service, configure it to use the local system account or another user account with network access permissions.

Map network drives when running the agent as service

For all Windows platforms, when the user is logged off, the service cannot resolve the mapping of network drives. In cases when the service cannot work with mapped network drives, use the full path to the directory, for example, <\\<machine-name>\<directory>\>.