What’s the story of SAM?

Try SAM—it’s your job schedule’s best friend

Robot/SCHEDULE’s Schedule Activity Monitor (SAM) displays your job schedule at a glance. It can be the tool that your team uses for planning your scheduling day, or for knowing what has happened, what is happening, and what will happen—your past, present, and future—rolled into one useful window.

SAM gives you access to job status, properties, job logs, the operating system job name, user, number, and types. It lets you drill into an individual job, yet still see the “big picture” on your server. It incorporates group jobs, reactive jobs, user-submitted batch jobs, agent jobs, EVERY-type jobs (jobs scheduled to run at timed intervals), jobs waiting on messages, jobs on the job queue, and completed jobs.

Launching SAM

You can launch SAM as a toolbar item from the Robot/SCHEDULE Explorer. You’ll see the entire schedule of Robot/SCHEDULE jobs.

SAM—the Schedule Activity Monitor

You also can launch SAM from Agents, Groups, and Application Name. Then, you see only the jobs that are part of the selection. For example, if you want to see only the jobs that are running on one of your AIX agents, right-click the agent and select SAM.

Preferences

Like playing a video game, when you first enter the castle you must look around. SAM’s Preferences window is a good place to start. On this window you can tailor the properties of the display to fit your settings. How often do you want to refresh SAM automatically? Do you want to see your EVERY-type jobs in the forecast? Do you want to see all jobs in the Completion window, or only jobs that failed? Do you want to see job status updated as they change from forecasted to running? SAM can update the job information associated with the forecasted job when the display refreshes.

Forecasting

Forecasting is an interesting world in scheduling land. Some things can “get” you if you have a lot of external events that trigger events in Robot/SCHEDULE. Robot/SCHEDULE doesn’t know about these external events unless you create a forecasted job in Robot/SCHEDULE. If you really want your forecast to be accurate, you should learn how to create forecast jobs. Twice a day, at 1100 and 2300, Robot/SCHEDULE automatically creates an internal forecast that it uses in SAM and for forecast options. This internal forecast lists the jobs in their predicted order of execution, plus the calculated run duration based on the average run time of the job. A little history of job execution helps a lot. (If you are new to Robot/SCHEDULE, you’ll probably need a few weeks to build up some consistent information for your forecast.)

You can rebuild the internal forecast at any time during the day, or directly from SAM. This causes any past jobs to fall off the list. Another way to do this is to schedule the RBTBLDFCT command throughout the day. You might try this if your schedule changes a lot during the day. Just create a Robot/SCHEDULE job to run a few times daily.

As jobs run, their icon turns green if the forecasted job matches a submitted job. The detail behind the job is updated to show the number, the user, and some job information. Sometimes the forecasted job never runs or doesn’t match what was submitted. If this happens, you can manually mark the job as completed. If you do, it falls off the list and you’ll see a yellow caution icon next to it.

What’s running?

The middle column of the SAM display shows the submitted Robot/SCHEDULE jobs that are executing. You also can see jobs waiting on messages in QSYSOPR. If you change your preferences to display user-submitted jobs, you’ll see all of the jobs submitted while Robot/SCHEDULE was running. This can clutter the screen, but it might be necessary information for your environment. A recent feature incorporates the jobs delayed by OPerator Assistance Language (OPAL) to give your team a more accurate view of what’s happening. (Jobs become delayed if you use the OPAL ADDMIN operation.)

What’s completed?

Robot/SCHEDULE is all about completing jobs. Some of our customers process more than 10 million batch jobs a year using Robot/SCHEDULE. SAM shows every job that completes, or only the abnormal completions. I’m a big fan of management by exception—just show me the problem jobs so we can resolve issues fast.

From the Completion column you can drill into job properties and display the job log and spooled file data associated with the job. You can copy the contents of the job log to a Word document or an e-mail. That way, you can send critical information to an administrator or another appropriate person.

Recent enhancements

The following capabilities were added to SAM for Robot/SCHEDULE R10M33 and above:

• You can set Preferences to exclude EVERY-type jobs.
• You can set Preferences to update the Forecast column as batch jobs are sent to execute.
• The Forecast column updates submitted jobs to green and puts the job detail information in the background.
• The Execution column now displays OPAL-Delayed jobs.
• You can mark a forecasted job as acknowledged on the Forecast column.

Marking a forecasted job as acknowledged.

SAM is your best friend

Give SAM a try, it’s the production control department’s best friend. We know you’ll like it.

Contributed by Tom Huntington, Vice President of Technical Services

Q & A

Is interactive message queue monitoring supported in Robot/CONSOLE 5?

Yes, Robot/CONSOLE helps you monitor interactive message queues. You can define and monitor the interactive message queues of the user profiles on the system.

You just specify which interactive job message queues you want Robot/CONSOLE to monitor, as well as the Robot/CONSOLE message center that should receive the messages.

Does the Robot/NETWORK graphical interface (the Robot/NETWORK Explorer) need to be updated on each PC every time you update the Robot/NETWORK Host or a Node?

Not necessarily. The Robot/NETWORK Explorer PC code is not updated as often as the IBM i code, so there may not be an update available. However, the Robot/NETWORK Explorer should be at the latest release level any time you update the Robot/Network Host.