Job Scheduling

IT Operations will perform standard routines, queries or reports delegated to it as part of delivering services; or as part of routine housekeeping delegated by Technical and Application Management teams.

Job Scheduling involves defining and initiating job-scheduling software packages to run batch and real-time work. This will normally involve daily, weekly, monthly, annual and ad hoc schedules to meet business needs.

In addition to the initial design, or periodic redesign, of the schedules, there are likely to be frequent amendments or adjustments to make during which job dependencies have to be identified and accommodated. There will also be a role to play in defining alerts and Exception Reports to be used for monitoring/checking job schedules. Change Management plays an important role in assessing and validating major changes to schedules, as well as creating Standard Change procedures for more routine changes.

Run-time parameters and/or files have to be received (or expedited if delayed) and input – and all run-time logs have to be checked and any failures identified.

If failures do occur, then re-runs will have to be initiated, under the guidance of the appropriate business units, often with different parameters or amended data/file versions. This will require careful communications to ensure correct parameters and files are used.

Many organizations are faced with increasing overnight batch schedules which can, if they overrun the overnight batch slot, adversely impact upon the online day services – so are seeking ways of utilizing maximum overnight capacity and performance, in conjunction with Capacity Management. This is where Workload Management techniques can be useful, such as:

• Re-scheduling of work to avoid contention on specific devices or at specific times and improve overall throughput
• Migration of workloads to alternative platforms/environments to gain improved performance and/or throughput (virtualization capabilities make this far more achievable by allowing dynamic, automated migration)
• Careful timing and ‘interleaving’ of jobs to gain maximum utilization of available resources.

Date: 2014-12-29; view: 874