Starting with SAS 9.4, not only will SAS administrators see lots of processes running on your operating system supporting the various SAS servers (such as SAS Metadata server), you will also see two new processes that have a description of “agent” running.  Agents are software processes responsible for tasks such as discovering software components on each platform, gathering metrics and availability data, performing resource control actions and backups. It is very important to keep these agents running on each tier and host platform of your SAS deployment.

Here's a brief overview of these agents and why it is important to keep them running at all times:

• SAS Deployment Agent is required for some administration activities such as creating new servers, configuring middle-tier clustering, and using the Deployment Backup and Recovery tool which is new with SAS 9.4.  It provides an integrated method for backing up and recovering your SAS content across multiple tiers and machines.  More details, including starting and stopping these agents, can be found under Chapter 8 — SAS Deployment Agent in the SAS® Deployment Wizard and SAS® Deployment Manager 9.4: User’s Guide and  Using the Deployment Backup and Recovery Tool in the SAS 9.4 Intelligence Platform: System Administration Guide.
• SAS Environment Manager Agent is used to automatically discover and communicate with server resources to gather health and availability information, perform control actions, collect usage information, and monitor logs. For more information about its role, see the Overview of SAS Environment Manager.

As you can see, these agents are extremely important to SAS 9.4 and terminating them will cause issues with your SAS deployment. Here’s a list of all required servers that should be running in your SAS 9.4 deployment.