Robot Best Practices

Last week, I wrote about best practices for systems management software. This week, I want to apply this idea to the Robot Automated Operations Solution. We’ll make two assumptions: 1) You’re managing more than one IBM i partition; 2) You’re interested in achieving lights-out automation.

1. The Robot products are built to automate. Each product has rules that you can tailor to handle most situations. Occasionally, if you can't just fill in the blank to automate, you might need to write a CL program (a script) to help automate a process. The key is always to have an eye toward automation and always ask the question “Can we run this automatically?”
2. The Robot solution is not just for the operations team. With automation, your developers have fewer interruptions and your system administrators spend less time babysitting systems.
3. You should use Robot/NETWORK to manage exceptions from a single console. It provides a topology map of your network and a central spot to monitor network statuses. Robot/NETWORK allows you to administer your scheduling and monitoring rules from a central location. Use its Product Masters to create rules for scheduling batch processes or automating message events centrally. You just create rules on the Host system and distribute them automatically to the Node systems.
4. Be sure to use Robot/SCHEDULE reactive jobs and group jobs to handle dependencies. And, use Reserved Command Variables to dynamically pass parameters like dates, job environments, and application names. This helps with work management values and for sorting jobs. The Robot/SCHEDULE command entry area is where you put the programs you want to call. You also can use this area to execute commands like CHGJOB or OVRPRTF to control jobs.
5. To automate message traffic management, Robot/CONSOLE message sets are a must. Message sets let you suppress messages, change message text and color, determine who can reply to a message, and execute programs based on a message. Use Robot/CONSOLE message tables, message groups, and OPerator Assistance Language (OPAL) to automate further. For example, message tables are handy for creating rules to automate multiple events. Robot/CONSOLE resource monitoring is especially useful for automatically monitoring critical resources that can impact Service Level Agreements.

Next week, we’ll explore some specific best practices for Robot/SPACE, Robot/SAVE, and Robot/REPORTS.