New Robot/SCHEDULE GUI provides drill-down access and more!

Have you had a recent business audit on the production control (job scheduling) area of your computer operations? Is your management team asking for reports detailing who changed what batch job for night processing? Did the auditor ask about who has access or authority to change the jobs in the schedule? Did the auditor ask for a report that lists all the jobs that ran last night?

Is there a way to submit the RBT650 report from a CL program? I run this report as part of my yearly Sarbanes-Oxley audit and it would be great if I could automate it.
The Completion Message Listing report (RBT650) prints all the completion messages that have occurred on the system. You can run it from a CL program by doing a call with the correct parameters, as follows:

CALL RBT650 Parm(’caaaaaabbbbbbjjjjjjjjjjggggggggggX’)

Where:

c = completion code

a = beginning date in system date format (000000 for no beginning date)

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.

Although SEQUEL executive dashboards are most commonly used to track business indicators, they also can display operations data to help you streamline and improve your System i operations. In fact, a SEQUEL executive dashboard could be a crucial tool if you must comply with Service Level Agreements (SLAs). This article describes how key performance indicators stored in the database files the Robot products maintain can be incorporated into SEQUEL executive dashboards.

Manage job schedules and batch jobs
The sample Robot/SCHEDULE dashboard (below) displays metrics to help you evaluate job scheduling and batch management. It can help you answer many interesting operations questions.

Makes it easier to learn, use, and manage the product

Robot/SCHEDULE 10 introduces a new graphical user interface (GUI). Although most users are comfortable with Robot/SCHEDULE’s traditional green screens, there are a lot of great reasons to try the new GUI. These fall into two main categories: overall ease of use and new features available exclusively through the GUI.

Ease of use
* Data organization. The Robot/SCHEDULE Explorer tree lets you see jobs organized by application or group job.

Newly centralized data processing relies on the Robot Products

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Is there a simple way to check that a Robot/SCHEDULE job completed normally every morning at 5 a.m.?
If you are using Robot/SCHEDULE 9.0 and Robot/ALERT, this is a good way to check:

1. Create a second Robot/SCHEDULE job (Job2) that runs the RBASNDMSG command. Make the message text something that would indicate the job you are monitoring (Job1) has not run. Schedule this job to run every day you want to monitor Job1 and choose a time for it to run.

2. Edit Job1. Add the RBTBCHUPD command to the command entry panel as the final command. Use this command to put a Schedule Override Code of Omit (O) on Job2.

Change in U.S. law requires updates

Due to a change in the law (The Energy Policy Act of 2005), Daylight Saving Time (DST) in the United States has been extended by four additional weeks. Starting in 2007, Daylight Saving Time begins on the second Sunday in March (March 11, 2007) and ends on the first Sunday in November (November 4, 2007).

If you use the QTIMZON system value, IBM has issued the following Program Temporary Fixes (PTFs) that add time zone descriptions to comply with the new rules for 2007 and beyond. After you apply the appropriate PTFs for your OS level, you can change the QTIMZON system value to the new value for your region. Note: Continue to check with IBM in the event that future PTFs become available.

By evaluating your goals, the choice may become clearer

If you have both Robot/SCHEDULE and Robot/CONSOLE, you have two Help/Systems products that can help you with resource monitoring. Robot/SCHEDULE checks local resources and their current status by using OPAL. Robot/CONSOLE lets you set up an automated process to monitor resources such as lines, subsystems, controllers, and more without writing OPAL. When you use Robot/CONSOLE resource monitoring, it notifies you whenever resources are not available (not in the expected state) and when their status changes again. It also provides a detailed history of all the status checks.