Good Morning!

Just the other day I had a great conversation with our SEQUEL Product Manager, Sheryl Quinlan, about Good Morning Reports and the idea behind them. As a result, Sheryl and her team will be working to develop something similar for SEQUEL.

Our founder, Richard Jacobson, coined the term Good Morning Report way back when. The idea then was to create a report that offered a management-level summary of key Robot product metrics and usage. Today, we might call this information “data center metrics.” The reports also indicate how much you’re utilizing a product, which is useful for management and audit teams.

Robot/SCHEDULE was a driving force for these reports. Its Good Morning Report summarizes Robot/SCHEDULE jobs—the total number of jobs, the jobs that finished successfully, the jobs that failed, and the abnormal starts. It also records deviations from run times and forecasted time by percentage.

Robot/SAVE uses the same concept by summarizing tape activity over time: How many tapes are in the scratch pool? Have any tapes been used too many times? How many tapes are cataloged? Which partitions are included in the centralized tape management strategy?

All of the Good Morning Reports can be scheduled in Robot/SCHEDULE to collect data for a day, a week, a month, or as often as you want. They can be used as an indicator of the level of automation you’ve achieved. I find them to be a great resource to use with any of our products.

Speaking of great automation resources, here’s an article discussing the important distinction between writing automation tools and true automation.