Central job-scheduling console makes troubleshooting multi-platform schedules easier

As we automate more and more of the data center, we realize that just because something is automated doesn’t mean something won’t go wrong. Eventually, some automated tasks are going to fail, and when they fail, you may need to sign on to the server and view the logs for these events or provide reports to your management team.

Troubleshooting and quick thinking can be a challenge when you’re debugging production control issues in the middle of the night. The last thing you want to do is spend time searching for the evidence. Every minute you spend looking for logs or reports that help uncover the problem is time ticking away on the Service Level Agreement. Where do you find that one-click approach to troubleshooting your job schedule?

Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise is Help/Systems’s answer to these troubleshooting difficulties. For years, Robot/SCHEDULE has quickly solved System i-based scheduling issues. With Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise, Help/Systems has conquered these issues for Windows, UNIX, and Linux production control teams.

The Robot/SCHEDULE Explorer supports drill-down, copy-and-paste, and filtering, which help you identify and correct problems quickly. With the drill-down ability, you simply select a job to find the appropriate log. You can use the copy-and-paste function to send other team members the proper documentation to help remedy a batch problem. You can copy data into spreadsheet or word processing software to distribute it to your team easily. If you have a particularly troublesome area, you can build predefined filters to find specific problems faster.

Simply double-click a spooled file to begin troubleshooting a failed job.

Stay ahead of the game
Part of troubleshooting is staying ahead of the game. Many operations departments are concerned about meeting their Service Level Agreements. You may want to know if a job process ran too long, ran too quickly, or did not start on time. Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise can notify you no matter where you are, or create a report for your review.

The Robot/SCHEDULE Explorer supports direct interfaces to the servers that are running the Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise software. You can use a shell program directly from the Explorer to execute UNIX or Windows diagnostic commands. Each agent defined to Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise has diagnostic logs on the Enterprise server. You also can view all active processes on an agent system from the Robot/SCHEDULE Explorer. These tools allow you to troubleshoot remote servers without leaving your office.

Once you have the list of jobs that ended abnormally, you can see whether a job is an agent job or a System i job. You can look at the jobs’ spooled files to identify the agent log and the job log from the System i. Then, you can open the agent log and see the problems. You do all of your troubleshooting from one central console.

Specify return codes
Most scheduling programs cannot diagnose problems because they cannot process the feedback returned from an application’s script. Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise makes it easy for the operator to specify acceptable return codes in each script to determine failure or success. This provides an easy way to monitor the processes without complicated script coding.

In this example, a return code of zero (0), or in the range of 250 to 256, means the job rans successfully. Any other return code means the job was not successful.

The main benefit of using one user interface for your enterprise scheduling is the time you’ll save. The administrator can sit at one workstation to manage all your servers. And, you save time training other staff members since they only need to learn one interface to manage the enterprise.

With all of these options at your fingertips, your team can save time and effort diagnosing and fixing critical batch processing issues. Time is everything when it comes to resolving problems and meeting critical deadlines.

Contributed by Josh Richards, Technical Writer