Stay on top of SLAs
One of my slogans is “little problems become big problems if left alone.” When we manage our service-level agreements (SLAs), we are concerned with notification and reporting that keeps us informed about the status of critical processes or an unknown event that can cause other processes to not finish on time.
A little problem could be a file that is late from an external or internal process, a batch process that has stopped due to a message wait or record lock, a service that has ended normally on a Windows server, or an operator who forgot to submit a process. If you know about these little problems in the first five minutes, they will have little or no impact on processing and will not become big problems.
Time can cause you to miss your SLA, but lack of notification about these small problems is the real foe. Proper notification during critical times of processing is essential in a multi-platform/multi-system environment. These notifications can be e-mails, text messages, interactive bubbles on the operator’s workstation, sounds blaring in the data center, lights blinking, and maybe even an electrical shock! The notification process should be integrated into your scheduling tool.
Today I am looking at a request for proposal (RFP) from a customer using a free scheduling program. Many of their needs show that they do not have a truly automated schedule with built-in notifications. The downside of using a free scheduler is that you need to buy additional tools, or write a lot of internal code, to build dependencies and monitor for processes that are late or not running.
Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise is the answer to your SLA needs. It fixes many of the problems you need to solve and does much more with reporting, documentation, and control. Its built-in job monitors (see Figure 1) work with IBM i, AIX, Solaris, Linux, HP-UX, and Windows processes to notify you if a process is running too long, ran too quickly, or did not start on time.
Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise also can use messaging or paging technologies to notify your operator when there is a problem.
The job monitors report provides online or text-based reports that list events that might have been missed (see Figure 2).
Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise can monitor for file arrival, services up or down, daemons up or down, the server being ready for batch processing, and any batch scripts finishing or not finishing. Each script launched can have a different set of return codes that can be monitored. Every server that is defined to Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise is monitored to make sure that it is ready for processes.
Figure 1: Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise job monitors make it easy to keep up with SLAs.
Figure 2: You can display job monitor events online to show SLA issues for processes like Windows backups.
We know that controlling your enterprise scheduling is very important. To learn more about Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise or try it free for 30 days, contact your Help/Systems Regional Sales Manager.
Contributed by Tom Huntington, Vice President of Technical Services