Overview - Brief Description of Feature     

The Controller Base Feature is the framework on which most of the other controller features are built.  The primary component of the Controller Base is the InSight Controller Agent.  The Controller Agent is a system background process that communicates with all of the terminal agents, with controller agents on other nodes, and with management applications and utilities.

Problem - What Problem Does the Feature Solve?

InSight's data model is designed to give management applications a view of the entire store from a single access point.  It is not necessary for management applications to connect to individual agents in each terminal and each controller to retrieve information or status or to send commands.  The Controller Base feature and Controller Agent provide this single access point.  Another key InSight design point is speed and resource efficiency.  The controller agent uses limited resources and efficiently gathers and caches data into its own memory and disk databases to minimize resource use in providing management fucnctionality.

Solution - Short Description of How the Feature Works

The controller agent is a multi-threaded system background task that is automatically started during the system boot process.  As a system background task, it does not appear on the background task list and functions as a true system extension similar to the many other system background tasks.  The controller agent acts as a server program for both outside management applications and for all of the terminal agents in the store system.