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ompanies rely on IT operations to run the background processing needed for departmental output
and maintenance. Workload automation tools excel at automating these routine job streams, which
reduces error and speeds up time to market. Automation also frees up staff for more complex tasks.
When managing multiple servers and applications, it becomes diffcult to track job streams with cross-
system dependencies and a variety of schedules. Operators need to know instantly which tasks have
completed, which are running late, and which are failing.
Central monitoring and automatic notifcation are the keys to successful workload automation. Modern
workload automation (WLA) tools provide these features in a single package thats fast, easy to set up,
and easy to use. Monitoring and notifcation also free System Administrators and Operators from having
to perform manual checks for job statuses and resources, work overtime, or spend unnecessary time
locating and fxing errors.
A full-featured workload automation solution with monitoring and notifcation is mission-critical for
the following IT situations:
F Critical job streams that must start and complete on time without error.
F On-time services that require immediate notifcation.
F Failed jobs during non-business hours.
Critical Job Streams
Lets say that your payroll process runs every other Thursday afternoon. The process might include
a number of different jobs, such as summarizing the time entry information from each employee,
calculating the correct hourly rate and totals, calculating any added personal time accrual, sending
information to the IRS, and sending the check to the bank. Any number of these tasks, and more, would
be part of the payroll process.
As a Data Center Manager, you are responsible for making sure that each of these steps runs, that they
run in the correct order, and that they run on time. Its ineffcient and expensive to have someone such
as an Operator or Help Desk Technician monitor the process as it runs.
Computers, on the other hand, work 24/7 and never take a vacation or sick day. WLA tools monitor
critical, system-wide processes, so your operators dont have to.
Your workload automation solution must include monitoring and automatic notifcation for the
following events:
F Server goes down.
F Process terminates unexpectedly.
F Process is delayed.
Whos Minding the Store?
3 Situations where Central Monitoring and Automatic Notifcation are Essential
By Pat Cameron
Skybot
Software
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Date: 2013-05-28 14:51+05:30
Fast. Easy. Automate.
F Process is looping and running much longer than normal.
F New fle arrives in a directory.
F File or directory grows past a set threshold.
F File or directorys size changes or date and time stamp change.
F Daemon or service ends unexpectedly.
Think of the last time you were called in to the data center because of a delay in processing or because
a job stream needed to be rerun. The root cause of the problem was probably one of the above events.
Automatic notifcation is the key to a smoothly running shop.
On-Time Services
Its imperative that staff responsible for providing on-time service is notifed as soon as possible when
an event occurs. For example, if a customer places an order on your website and that process creates a
fle or adds a record to a fle on your web server, your WLA tool can monitor for the new fles or fle
changes and execute a process to move that order to the next step. The sales rep for that account also can
be notifed automatically.
These WLA tools use SMTP for text messages or email and SNMP to send to or receive traps from the
central server. Either method of automatic notifcation can be used throughout any critical job process.
Many times Help Desk software interfaces with the WLA tool, so that a ticket can be automatically
created when an error occurs.
If you have any service level agreements (SLA) with your customers, you may want to monitor for start
or end times to make sure you hit your SLAs every time.
Notifcation options should include setting a threshold for the length of time a process runs, setting a
time that a task must start or end by, as well as notifying on errors.
You also can monitor for a minimum processing time. Sometimes when jobs run for only a few
secondseven if the exit code says the completion is normalits not. Obviously, that process did not
do what it was supposed to.
Failed Jobs
Along with automatic notifcation, you should be able to set up an automatic error recovery process that
fxes predictable errors and, at the very least, stops the job stream so that you dont have to re-run the
entire process if an error does occur.
Lets go back to the example of the payroll process that runs on Thursday evenings. If one of the steps
fails, you want to make sure that the process stops and whoever supports the payroll process is notifed
immediately. Proceeding to the next step would cause major issues with payroll and may require some
type of restore, not to mention a re-run of the entire job stream. The failure should also be able to
trigger an error recovery process, such as automatically restoring the database fles affected by the error.
Automation of error recovery steps, in addition to notifcation, should be a requirement in todays
workload automation applications. Examples of these automation functions include:
F Email the error logs to the support staff.
F Open a ticket in your Help Desk or customer support application.
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Fast. Easy. Automate.
Modern customer support applications include some type of communication interface, such as SMTP
or SNMP, so that tickets are created at the time of the problem, include error codes and logs, and are
assigned to the correct staff member for resolution.
Backups, invoicing, and other batch processes are usually scheduled to run during off hours when
you dont have hundreds of users on your systems. If a backup fails because it cant allocate a fle or
directory, you want to be notifed immediately so the correct action can be taken.
Failed backups may not seem like a huge issue when they occur. The problem comes when you need
to restore data from that backup and the fles are corrupted. As part of your disaster recovery plan, you
need to make sure that those backups are running as scheduled and completing successfully. Its not
always a natural disaster that requires a restore of fles, more commonly some type of human error
is the culprit. Thats another reason why automating as much as possible is good practice in all data
centers; it lowers the odds of an error occurring.
Enter Skybot Scheduler
Skybot Scheduler is the modern workload automation solution that seamlessly integrates business
processes through event-driven scheduling across Windows, UNIX, and Linux servers.
analysis tools, built-in audit history, and fle transfer management in a software package that installs
and deploys in minutes.
More than just a job scheduler, Skybot Scheduler includes central monitoring and notifcation, robust