Relays overview
Relays and NetComs manage communication between the OpCon server and agents across your environment. The Relays / NetComs page in Solution Manager gives you visibility into the status of all relay and NetCom instances and lets you perform management operations on relays.
What are relays and NetComs?
A relay is a communication component that routes messages between the OpCon server and agents when OpCon is hosted in Cloud and Agents are within customer's network premises. Relays support a primary/standby architecture — if the primary relay becomes unavailable, you can fail over to a standby relay to maintain agent communication.
A NetCom (SMA Network Communications Module) is the communication component that handles the direct connection between OpCon and its agents when both are within same infrastructure (On-Prem OpCon Installations where both OpCon and Agents are within customer's network premises OR Both OpCon and Agents are in Cloud). A relay is not required in these configurations.
Primary and standby architecture
Relays use a priority-based architecture to support failover:
- Primary relay — The active relay that handles all agent communication. Each relay name has one primary instance
- Standby relay — One or more backup instances that can take over if the primary relay becomes unavailable. Standby relays are ranked by priority number, where lower numbers indicate higher priority
When you perform a manual failover, OpCon transitions agent communication from the primary relay to a selected standby relay through a six-step process that drains messages, closes connections on the primary, and establishes new connections on the failover relay.
Page layout
The Relays / NetComs page uses a split-pane layout:
- Upper pane — The Relays grid displays all registered relay instances with their status, priority, version, and machine information. You can select relays to perform management actions such as restart, upgrade, view logs, and failover
- Lower pane — The NetComs grid displays all registered NetCom instances with their status, version, and machine information. This grid is read-only and provides monitoring visibility only
When to use this page
Use the Relays / NetComs page to:
- Monitor the communication status of relays and NetComs across your environment
- Restart a relay that is in Communicating or Standby status
- Upgrade a relay to a newer version
- View relay logs for troubleshooting
- Perform a manual failover from a primary relay to a standby relay
Prerequisites
All users can view the Relays / NetComs page. To perform relay management operations (restart, upgrade, and failover), you must have the OCADM role.