About gateways and agents

Elimity Insights gateways act as an intermediary between some of the built-in connectors in Elimity Insights and the source systems they pull data from. SaaS customers should typically not install or configure any gateways at all, since Elimity Insights will default to using the gateways managed by Elimity itself. On-prem customers however might consider self-hosting these gateways because of firewall restrictions.

Import agents on the other hand are often useful for both SaaS and on-prem customers. They facilitate importing from custom source systems like an SQL database server or LDAP directory. Import agents independently push data to an Elimity Insights custom source, following a schedule configured by the customer.

This article provides more information about installing and upgrading Elimity Insights gateways and import agents.

Requirements

We distribute all Elimity Insights gateways and import agents as Docker images for both Linux and Windows Server hosts. Our recommendation for deploying these is to use your cloud provider's container hosting solution (e.g. Google Cloud Run, Azure Container Apps, ...). Elimity Insights gateways typically are stateless HTTP servers that matches most cloud provider's definition of a microservice, while import agents can run as a standalone job. Using your cloud provider's container hosting solution has the following advantages:

• No manual VM management
• Encrypted connections to gateways via out-of-the box HTTPS reverse proxy
• Cost-effective since you only pay when the gateway / agent is actually importing
• Great integration with your cloud provider's key vault for mounting secrets
• Configuration / monitoring / upgrades via your cloud provider's user-friendly UI

We also support deploying manually on e.g. Windows Server if using your cloud provider's container hosting solution is not an option. In either case please refer to our knowledge base article about working with containers for detailed setup instructions.

Deployment

Azure Container Apps, Google Cloud Run, ...

As mentioned previously, we recommend deploying Elimity Insights gateways and import agents using your cloud provider's container hosting solution. Refer to the following shell commands as an example of how to transfer an LDAP import agent image to your Azure Container Registry for deployment in Azure Container Apps:

# Step 1: Pull the original image from Elimity's Google Cloud artifact registry
# make sure you have installed and configured Google's credential helper for Docker
$ docker pull europe-west1-docker.pkg.dev/elimity-general/docker/ldap-import-agent:v2.0.1

# Step 2: Create an alias for the pulled image to use in your Azure Container Registry
$ docker tag \
    europe-west1-docker.pkg.dev/elimity-general/docker/ldap-import-agent:v2.0.1
    myregistry.azurecr.io/elimity-insights/ldap-import-agent:v2.0.1

# Step 3: Push the alias to your Azure Container Registry.
# Make sure you have configured Docker to authenticate with Azure Container Registry
$ docker push myregistry.azurecr.io/elimity-insights/ldap-import-agent:v2.0.1

Plain Windows Server

If deploying using your cloud provider's container hosting solution is not an option, then refer to the following Docker Compose specification for an example of how to deploy an LDAP import agent and a Vercel gateway manually on Windows Server 2022:

services:
  ldap-import-agent:
    image: europe-west1-docker.pkg.dev/elimity-general/docker/ldap-import-agent:v2.0.1-nanoserver-ltsc2022
    restart: always
    volumes:
      - ./config:C:/app/config

  vercel-gateway:
    image: europe-west1-docker.pkg.dev/elimity-general/docker/vercel-gateway:v1.1.3-nanoserver-ltsc2022
    ports:
      - 8080:80
    restart: always