The CIC Agent and CIC Gateway

CIC Agent is a lightweight and headless extension of Cleo Integration Cloud platform. CIC Agent enables integration where APIs cannot reach, allowing you to extend control and visibility to on-premise or private cloud infrastructure.

How does it work?

The CIC Agent helps meet the challenge shown below. As CIC Gateway receives data from your partners and external applications, it aims to route that data to your backend systems, such as your ERP, CRM, WMS, etc. Due to firewalls, you would need to open inbound ports to allow CIC to access your backend system if we did not have the CIC Agent.

Diagram 1: System without CIC Agent

The CIC Agent is designed to solve this problem. The CIC Agent (as shown in Diagram 2 below) is headless software that can be installed on a private server in your data center with access to the backend-system applications that you want to integrate with. The CIC Agent, once activated, establishes a secure connection via mutual TLS authentication with CIC Gateway and can, thereby, proxy requests to your backend systems from CIC Gateway and from your backend systems to CIC. Given that the CIC Agent sends logging events back to CIC Gateway, it also provides visibility for the "last mile" of your integration all the way from your partner down to your backend systems.

Diagram 2: System with an active CIC Agent

How does the CIC Agent relate to Access Points?

An Access Point is a handle for (or way of referencing) a given installed CIC Agent from within CIC Gateway and so the process of installing and activating a CIC Agent involves creating an Access Point in CIC Gateway. To get access to the code to install and activate a CIC Agent, you need to first sign in to CIC Gateway and navigate to Network > Access Points. From there, you click on the Add New Access Point icon to create an Access Point. You specify the Operating System for the server where you want to install your CIC Agent and then you will be given a script to run on the server to install and activate the agent. You will name and save your Access Point. Then once you install and activate the CIC Agent, your named Access Point associated with that CIC Agent will now and forever indicate the status of your agent. You will also be able to centrally manage that CIC Agent through CIC Gateway via the Access Point. For instance, the real-time status of the CIC Agent will be shown in the status of the Access Point and you will be able to update the CIC Agent from CIC Gateway by simply upgrading the Access Point to the latest version. For more details on Access Points, see What is an Access Point in CIC Gateway?  and Managing Access Points in CIC Gateway. 

What are the benefits of using the CIC Agent?

Lightweight – Requiring minimal footprint and with an extremely small surface area, CIC Agent doesn’t require any expansion or investment in your on-premise infrastructure footprint. (100MB storage for CIC Agent - which is separate from log files)

Headless – CIC Agent is UI-free allowing for invisible deployment for completely remote configuration and control from Cleo Integration Cloud. (Initial installation requires logging in to the machine the agent is installed on, but after that, everything can be managed through CIC.)

Secure – CIC Gateway binds cryptographically to the cloud using an SSL-encrypted handshake and authorizes all communications via x509 certificate exchange.

High-powered - Massive power from a tiny application. Incredible horsepower for processing throughput, moving data, and connecting your internal ecosystem.

Remote lifecycle management – upgrade CIC Agent from the cloud

End-to-end visibility – CIC Agent allows you to seamlessly connect your ecosystem of trading partners, cloud applications, and traditional systems.

Complete the integration lifecycle with intuitive end-to-end visibility across revenue-driving business processes.

CIC Agent lets you close insight gaps in integration flows, and eliminate blind spots in your operational monitoring for optimized communications and transactions.

Protect SLAs and meet KPIs around response times and exception management by more quickly identifying and addressing integration errors.