The management agent, ma, executes management commands on HADB hosts and ensures availability of the HADB node supervisor processes by restarting them if they fail.
You can start the management agent two ways:
As a service, for production use. See Starting the Management Agent as a Service. To ensure availability of the management agent, make sure it is restarted automatically when the system reboots. See Ensuring Automatic Restart of the Management Agent.
As a regular process (in console mode), for evaluation, testing, or development. See Starting the Management Agent in Console Mode.
In each case, the procedures are different depending on whether you are using Java Enterprise System or the standalone Application Server.