How the Robot products help you meet your SLAs

Check out the ways the new graphical interfaces can help!

If your data center relies on the System i and has to meet a service level agreement (SLA), you should look at how the latest releases of Robot/SCHEDULE, Robot/CONSOLE, and Robot/NETWORK can help you meet your SLA more efficiently and with less stress.

Robot/SCHEDULE 10
Robot/SCHEDULE’s graphical user interface, the Robot/SCHEDULE Explorer, gives you easy access to a number of tools to help you meet your SLA goals. These include job monitors that create logs and reports about critical events and the Schedule Activity Monitor (SAM).

SAM is your window into Robot/SCHEDULE. It is a visual reference you can use to verify that your jobs are running as expected. Whether you’re new to Robot/SCHEDULE, or an experienced user, SAM can help you monitor your job schedule.

SAM monitors all of your jobs and, using tabs, lets you control which part(s) of your job schedule you want to display. When you start SAM, the Summary tab displays, showing the job activity in the system: Forecasted, Running/Waiting, and Completed/Failed. You can select a specific tab for more detailed information.

Job monitors allow you to monitor your job schedule for specific events, such as jobs that run too long (overruns), complete too quickly (underruns), or start later than their scheduled run time (late start). You can specify the criteria for each job at setup time.

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 using Robot/ALERT; or sending a status to the Robot/NETWORK Status Center.

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

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

Robot/CONSOLE 5
The Robot/CONSOLE graphical user interface, the Robot/CONSOLE Explorer, also provides tools for monitoring and managing resources such as controllers, subsystems, servers, or jobs. Robot/CONSOLE can monitor System i resources for a desired status and take actions based on that status.

You specify the resources to be monitored, the status each resource should have, and how often the resource is checked. Resource monitoring notifies Robot/CONSOLE when resources are not available and when they become available again. If a resource is not in the expected status, it triggers an event that creates a message.

Resources can be dependent on other resources. For example, devices are dependent on controllers and controllers are dependent on lines. To reduce the number of messages from unavailable resources, you can define some resources as primary resources and the resources dependent on those resources as secondary resources. When a primary resource is detected in an unexpected status, its secondary resources are placed in a Pending status and Robot/CONSOLE does not monitor them.

Resource monitoring provides a detailed history of status checks. You can include a summary of resource status on the Good Morning Report. The Resource History List Report and Resource Setup Report also contain information on monitored resources.

Robot/NETWORK 10
If you are working with more than one system, or multiple partitions, the Robot/NETWORK Status Center lets you track the products of the Robot Automated Operations Solution and events on Nodes, from a single location. If a problem occurs on a remote system, the Status Center displays a status for that location.

• Consolidated Statuses. Manage statuses across the network (even across multiple Robot/NETWORK Hosts) from a single graphical Status Center that also offers sorting and filtering.
• System Tray Status Notification. When the Robot/NETWORK Explorer is running, you can configure the status notifier to appear in your Windows system tray. When a critical status arrives, you’re notified with a pop-up bubble from the system tray.
• One-Click Message Management. You can manage Robot/CONSOLE statuses from the Status Center and reply to messages.

Conclusion
The new Explorer graphical user interfaces are not just for looks. They help you manage real-world challenges, like your SLAs.

Contributed by Jeanne Thiesfeld, Technical Consultant