Re: managing scheduled jobs

[oliver.wenzel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Hi,


>No matter what scheduler you use (robot, ibm, etc.) there are scheduling 
issues 
>that constantly confront us.  Jobs can be submitted/scheduled to multiple 
jobqs 
>by users, other processes, schedulers, etc.

>What is working for you to manage this complexity?  Spreadsheets showing 
>jobname, jobq, sbm time, elapsed time, etc?

Job scheduling is a constant pain in the a**. We have bought IBM's 
Advanced job scheduler about a year ago,
as our scheduling system was getting more and more complex.

Basically, we have seperate jobqeueues for daily and night processing. 
Daily work is stopped at midnight and 
the night queues are released. We have a backup window from midnight to 
2am, so the schedule is tight.

99% of our users don't know how to change jobs to another jobq, so that 
isn't much of a problem. 

To be honest, the Advanced job scheduler has added another layer of 
complexity and possibilities for errors. 
You can define job dependencies, but it has its own dangers.

Make sure you know each and every job description and when and where it is 
used. Watch out for changed jobq entries
on the scheduled jobs. I found several jobs that had jobq A in the 
description but where actually using jobq B.

You could set up routing entries (in the batch subsystems) to watch out 
for user/jobd/jobq combinations. 

A chart showing job, jobq and submit time can be very helpful:

TIME          JOBQ A    JOBQB      JOBQC

10:00         SER100
11:00                    SYS250

Regards,

Oliver