Cloud Agent Service

Solver is a service providing reporting, budgeting and analysis for businesses and accountants in the cloud. In addition to cloud-based ERP services, it also supports a hybrid setup by enabling the cloud to use an ERP system in an on-premise location for reporting data and showing vouchers from a local file storage. The cloud agent is what enables this connection by acting as a bridge, performing queries and retrieving data on behalf of Solver cloud. It is an application that is installed on a server in the local domain.

REQUIREMENTS

How the agent works

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1. The cloud agent connects to Solver’s data service and starts listening for requests. It is ensured that it is Solver’s server by verification of the certificate for the domain.
2. A user runs a report, triggering a request from Solver’s reporting server to the data service.
3. The data gateway finds the established connection with the customer’s agent and passes on the request. The actual process of finding the corresponding agent is done using a Pairing Key that is a manually transferred secret that is entered into the Solver Portal by the customer administrator.
4. The agent looks up the credentials and settings for the requested data source and executes the request; be it a query against an SQL server or reading a file.
5. The agent reads the result data from the data source.
6. The agent starts streaming back the result data to the data gateway.
7. The data gateway passes on the stream to the reporting service.

Note that all report queries are run directly on the ERP system; thus, always providing up-to-date information. The data generated by queries and retrieved files are not stored by Solver in the cloud in any other form than rendered reports.

Supported types of data sources

The agent supports the following types of data sources.

• SQL Server – This is usually the ERP system’s database.
• Files – This is usually one or more file shares where voucher data is stored.

Storing SQL Server credentials

When you add a SQL Server data source to the agent, you need to provide credentials (pairing key) for that database. All queries to the database will run using these credentials. The credentials are encrypted securely, using asymmetric encryption so that they cannot be decrypted by a third party.

All credentials are only stored locally on the agent machine and are never communicated outside of the agent.

Controlling file access

If a data source is to be used to fetch files, such as vouchers, you need to explicitly add one or more paths that the agent is allowed to read from.

Ports

The agent creates an outbound connection to Solver’s servers. It communicates on outbound port TCP 443. The agent does not require any inbound ports.

If you are experiencing connectivity issues due to firewall constraints it is recommended that you whitelist the IP addresses for the Azure center you are using in your firewall. (Contact Solver technical support for more information at (Support@solverglobal.com). You can download the Microsoft Azure Datacenter IP list, which is updated weekly. The agent communicates with the servers via HTTPS using the fully qualified domain name (FQDN). The current domain name is gateway.(data center).com.

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NOTE: Traffic going to visualstudio.com or visualstudioonline.com are for app telemetry and insights and are not required for the agent to function.