We have several activities that run on the background as scheduled agent activities. Due to performance some run once every 4 hours (works fine in production). When running our automated tests as part of our CI/CD pipeline we need to trigger these agents several times.

How do we do this? 

Investigated options:

• Set schedule to every minute for all agents => very severe impact on CPU and other resources of the platform (unacceptably high)
• Restart agent in Developer studio => requires sys admin rights, due to security concerns we do NOT give test automation accounts admin rights which allow code changes (sys admin is even worse).
• Specific rights to only restart the agent is acceptable on test environment
• Create button which runs activity in user space => not production like
• Pega 8 admin api service with pzAgentAdministrator => security concerns, possibility to change agent settings and way more rights than required
• Cut test in several parts and wait some hours between them => time to market == money, fast delivery requires a full test and not one spread over several instances with more code changes in between

Making API calls is not a problem for the testautomation team, if that helps