The Data Provisioning Agent hosts all SDI Adapters and acts as the communication interface between Hana and the Adapter. As such the DP Agent version has to match the Hana version. Which version to use is best found out by looking at the PAM (link) for Hana SDI, the Essential Information document.
The DP Agent can be installed anywhere and one Hana instance can have many agents configured. Hence there is a great freedom. Some adapters might have certain requirements however, e.g. a File Adapter can read all files it has access to. In order to read a file from a local disk drive, the File Adapter and therefore one Agent has to be installed on this local computer.
The SDI Agent can be downloaded as SAR file from SAP Service Marketplace like any other SAP application, provided it was licensed.
As the Adapters are written in Java, it is a good idea to check if Java is installed and what version.
The actual installation is straight forward. The hdbsetup.exe guides through the installation steps.
Since this is a network service, in case of Windows the domain\username (or hostname\username for local users) has to be provided. And then the service does listen on the two TCP/IP ports, by default 5050 and 5051.
When the installation is finished, the Windows Services should have a "SAP Hana Data Provisioning Agent" running.
Now this new agent has to be made known in Hana by executing the create-agent SQL command.The same can be accomplished by running the dpagentconfigtool.
In order to execute SQL commands the tool has to connect to Hana using the JDBC driver (or https in case Hana is in a different network with a firewall inbetween, e.g. a cloud instance) and the user has to have the required permissions.
Once connected the tool executes the CREATE AGENT <agent name> PROTOCOL 'TCP' host <hostname or IP> PORT 5050; command to register an agent. Hence an arbitrary agent name has to be entered and the local hostname.
Note: When using the TCPIP protocol, it is the Agent listening and Hana initiating the communication. Therefore the hostname has to be know to the Hanas system. In larger organisations that means the full qualified hostname has to be used often. Or the static IP address of the Agent computer, if there is one. This gets especially tricky in case the Agent runs on a computer with DHCP.
At the end the dpagentconfigtool should show that it is connected to Hana successfully, the agent name is registered and the agent is running and listening as shown below.
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