What is an Enterprise Job Scheduler?
Looking at the big picture, your enterprise job scheduler should be able to do what you are doing now—watch the job stream, make sure everything runs in the right order, and call someone if a problem arises. You should be able to set up your schedule and not have to worry about it. You should be confident that if there’s a problem, you’ll be notified so you can fix it before it escalates.
Many customers I’ve talked to over the years don’t think they need a job scheduler until we start talking about how their work day goes and how it never seems to end. Maybe “job scheduler” isn’t the right term.
Take a look at the following problems and see if they sound familiar. See if an “enterprise scheduler” is what you really need.
Problem: Spending Too Much Time Checking Your System
A comprehensive scheduler does more than just schedule a job to run at a specific time on a specific day. Many customers have jobs that are dependent on other jobs completing or on files arriving from another process, a customer, or a vendor. If the previous job doesn’t finish, or if that file isn’t refreshed in time, the next step in the process will run with errors and the whole cycle needs to be restarted.
To solve that problem, the production control staff sign in to the system at night to monitor the job stream. It’s easier to do that than to be surprised in the morning when something hasn’t finished and all of the day time users must log off and wait until the nightly process is rerun. A complete waste of time, money, and energy.
If any of the following items sound familiar, you could use an enterprise job scheduling solution:
- You log in to your systems every night to make sure that your processes are running.
- You log in each weekend to make sure there aren't any errors in your weekly job stream.
- You work overtime at the end of every month to make sure that all the processes on all of your production servers run at the correct time and in the correct order.
Problem: Multiple Schedules in the Same Data Center
Every application has its own schedule. And, whether or not your applications are dependent on each other, they need to be monitored. Without a proper enterprise scheduling solution, this monitoring is either manual, or you need to write a script to handle it.
Astute department directors buy the best-of-breed software for their needs. Previously, I was an operations manager at a hospital. Our patient registration system was from one vendor, our pharmacy system from another, accounting from another, and so on. They ran on different platforms and different servers, but they all needed to interface with each other for patient information, medical records, and billing. Many of the daily processes that ran on one system were dependent on processes, interfaces, or file transfers from another system.
The best way to resolve the issue of multiple schedulers is with an enterprise scheduler that can build cross-platform job streams to handle the different applications.
Problem: Using Cron for Scheduling Jobs
When your network was built several years ago, cron worked fine for scheduling jobs on each server. Then, your company grew and you acquired more servers. Now, no one knows what jobs are being scheduled and when. There are multiple crontabs for multiple users on each server. None of the servers “talk” to each other, so you have to write scripts to handle dependencies. If a command or script fails or gets in a loop, you don’t know until the next morning. You’d like to pass the scheduling responsibilities to a computer operator, but they’re intimidated by the cron scheduling expressions.
The Solution: Automate Schedule
Automate Schedule is the solution for all of these problems. Automate Schedule is the complete enterprise scheduling and workload automation solution for your business needs.
Monitor Your Job Processes for Overruns, Late Starts, and Errors
- Easily set up monitors for critical jobs that notify you automatically via text message if one of your jobs is delayed or fails.
- Create job dependencies in the schedule so that a job won't process until a prerequisite job or file change has occurred.
- Document your job flow easily and automatically.
Consolidate Schedules Across All of the Servers/Platforms in the Data Center
- From the Automate Schedule web-based interface, you can view jobs across all your servers.
- Set up job processes that depend on job completions on other servers.
- Forecast job processes across all platforms so that you can see the big picture and schedule efficiently.
Import Cron Jobs and Fill in the Gaps in Functionality
- Import all of your crontab files into one schedule.
- Audit all of the job changes that occur.
- Use point-and-click scheduling—no programming skills needed.
Automate Schedule works seamlessly across Windows, UNIX, and Linux servers. You can build an event- driven schedule quickly and easily for coordinated batch processing, cross-system monitoring, and true enterprise automation. Get started today!
