If you have to comply with Service Level Agreements, check this out!

When you are doing the day-to-day management of your batch processes—especially if you need to comply with Service Level Agreements (SLAs)—the new job monitors in Robot/SCHEDULE 10.0 can be very helpful. They can help answer questions such as:

• Did Job A complete on time?
• Did Job B complete too quickly?
• Did Job C start later than the forecasted start time?

You don’t need to use job monitors on every job. That would be overkill. But, you should use them for your critical jobs.

Setting up job monitors
When you set up the job monitors for a job, you specify the monitoring criteria (job overrun, job underrun, or late start). These options are independent of one another: you can use one, two, or all three. You also specify what Robot/SCHEDULE should do if it identifies a job monitor event. Robot/SCHEDULE can end a job or notify you by sending a message to the job’s message queue; sending a text, e-mail, or pager message via Robot/ALERT; or by sending a status message to the Robot/NETWORK Status Center.

When a monitored job reaches one or more of the criteria defined on the Job Monitors tab, Robot/SCHEDULE takes the specified action and enters a record in the job monitor event log. You can display this log from the Robot/SCHEDULE Explorer toolbar.

The Job Monitor Events Report lists all monitored events that have occurred on the system. You can specify whether to purge the job monitor log automatically, and how many job monitor events to retain in the log, on the General System Defaults window.

The Job Overrun monitor
The Job Overrun monitor detects jobs that run longer than their specified maximum duration, or complete later than a specified time of day. If the job does not meet the duration or completion time, the notification process begins. This type of check is ideal for long-running processes, such as backups or end-of-month processing. It is also good for processes that must complete by a specified time to avoid SLA penalties. For instance, your SLA may require data to be uploaded to the customer’s Web site by a specified time or you will incur a fine.

The Job Underrun monitor
The Job Underrun monitor detects jobs that complete in less than a specified minimum run time. This monitor is designed to be used with applications that rely on data that is sent to the System i from another server. If the data does not arrive on time, the files are empty. When the Robot/SCHEDULE job starts the application, it runs with great performance, but terrible results. Applications that perform data polling are notorious for this type of problem.

The Late Start monitor
The Late Start monitor detects jobs that start later than their scheduled run time by the amount of time you specify, or that start later than a specified time of day. This monitor is designed to notify you if a job has not started within the time parameters you specified. The “must start by” option is not valid for EVERY-type jobs.

Note: The Late Start monitor uses the *INTERNAL forecast to identify jobs that start later than their scheduled run time. If you add a job for which you want to specify a Late Start job monitor, the job must be included in a build of the *INTERNAL forecast to be monitored.

Effect on “dummy” jobs
To achieve similar results in earlier versions of Robot/SCHEDULE, you might have created “dummy” jobs that ran only if an important job did not finish on time. You can continue to use this approach in Robot/SCHEDULE 10.0, but we think you’ll find job monitors better and easier to implement.

Note: If you have been using the Help/FACTS, “Using the Robot Automated Operation Solution to Meet Service Level Agreements,” you’ll find that job monitors offer more options after you convert to Robot/SCHEDULE 10.0.

Contributed by Tom Huntington, Vice President of Technical Services

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 25th, 2007 at 9:43 am and is filed under Robot/SCHEDULE, Service Level Agreements. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.