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Tetra Empower Agent v5.2: Reducing injection data latency and improving reliability

December 2, 2023

The Tetra Empower Agent automates the process of collecting data from the Waters Empower Chromatography Data System (CDS) and making it available on the Tetra Scientific Data Cloud™, where it is converted to Tetra Data for data analysis, visualizations, and other use cases. Tetra Empower Agent v5.2 adds new functionality that reduces the latency between the time of injection and data availability while also improving the reliability of automated data acquisition.

These new capabilities and enhancements give scientists faster access to data and help reduce the likelihood and impact of batch processing errors—even as their organizations scale the volume of chromatography projects and injections.

  • Priority management: Users can now set scanning priority for “high” or “normal” projects in the agent management console. High-priority projects are scanned separately, before normal-priority projects. This can reduce the latency time dramatically for customers with a few active projects and large global Empower instances. Scientists can now access data from high-priority projects within minutes of injection completion.

Users can now denote high-priority projects
  • Horizontal scalability: With v5.2, users can reduce the latency between injection and data availability within the Tetra Scientific Data Cloud by dividing the scanning load across multiple agents—a technique known as horizontal scaling. Teams can now upload Empower data from multiple agents to a single cloud destination for data usage.

Users can now send data from multiple agents to a single destination ID.
  • Eliminated downtime for lost connectivity: The Empower Agent now recovers automatically from lost connectivity to the Empower server. It monitors connectivity, and if connectivity is lost, the agent terminates in-progress scanning and generation. As a result, the Empower Agent can restart scanning and generating processes quickly.

The Empower Connection Status Check (enabled by default) continuously monitors the connection and terminates processes to avoid them from hanging.
  • Maximum number of projects: Users can now set the maximum number of projects in a single scan process. The default value is 20, which should balance performance and reliability. But decreasing that value can help improve reliability and reduce the risk that users would have to delay later projects because of scan errors.

This update also contains bug fixes related to the scanning process, injection generation, and project-user access permissions.

For full details on v5.2, read the release notes. To see these new capabilities in action, watch this video.