Best Automation Practices for Robot/CONSOLE, Part 2

Last week, we discussed how Robot/CONSOLE works with rules, message sets, message centers, and Robot/ALERT, to be the automation autopilot for your IBM i systems. It automatically manages your messages, monitors your resources, and notifies you if necessary.

This week I want to talk about OPerator Assistance Language (OPAL). OPAL is a powerful part of Robot/CONSOLE for automation. It’s a macro language that you can use to automate some of your complicated message management procedures. It can use if-than-else logic to suppress, redirect, and answer messages; call programs; and execute commands. We even have an OPAL Cookbook that is full of automation "recipes" our customers have submitted.

One example of the power of OPAL is the informational message, “CPF2401 - job ended normally.” Typically we don’t care about this message because it means everything is normal. But, if it’s for a critical batch job, like a high availability (HA) job, we might want to know that the job ended. With OPAL logic, we can tell Robot/CONSOLE to make an informational message related to an HA job response required. Now, we’re automatically notified when the HA job completes normally.

During these two weeks, I’ve just touched the tip of Robot/CONSOLE best practices. Other best practices include resource monitoring, message groups, notification lists, and reports (like the Good Morning Report and the Most Common Message Reports), and setting up purges to keep the right amount of message history.

Whether you have one or many IBM i servers, Robot/CONSOLE handles all the "heavy lifting" of managing messages and monitoring resources.