In this chapter, we looked at the underlying factors that can drive the need to use an agent with ICS. Some thought was given to how we can deploy an agent, both for production purposes and to deploy an agent for demo and development purposes. The differences between a connection and execution agent were reviewed. Once the theoretical aspects of agents had been completed, the chapter then quickly walked through the deployment and configuration of a connection agent that ran on-premises (depending on how you deployed the agent in a virtual machine as well). We then created an integration on ICS running in Oracle's cloud that used the agent pushing data from the on-premises database to the Mockable web service. Finally, we initiated the integration to see the agent in action.

In the next chapter, we move away from connecting systems or mocks of systems and concentrate on how we can ensure that our integration platform is running smoothly, along with the integrations it is executing. We will also look at what to do in the event of an error and how to go about identifying and resolving the problem.