Anecdote. IT Operations will perform standard routines, queries or reports delegated to it as part of delivering services; or as part of routine housekeeping delegated

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 alert s and Exception Report s 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 procedure s 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 failure s identified.

If failures do occur, then re-runs will have to be initiated, under the guidance of the appropriate business unit s, often with different parameters or amended data/file version s. 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/ environment s 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 resource s.

One large organization, which was faced with batch overrun/utilization problem s, identified that, due to human nature where people were seeking to be ‘tidy’, all jobs were being started on the hour or at 15-minute intervals during the hour (i.e. n o’clock, 15 minutes past, half past, 15 minutes to, etc.).

By re-scheduling of work so that it started as soon as other work finished, and staggering the start times of other work, it was able to gain significant reductions in contention and achieve much quicker overall processing, which resolved its problem s without a need for upgrades.

Job Scheduling has become a highly sophisticated activity, including any number of variables – such as time-sensitivity, critical and non-critical dependencies, workload balancing, failure and resubmission, etc. As a result, most operation s rely on Job Scheduling tools that allow IT Operations to schedule jobs for the optimal use of technology to achieve Service Level Objective s.

The latest generation of scheduling tools allows for a single toolset to schedule and automate technical activities and Service Management process activities (such as Change Scheduling). While this is a good opportunity for improving efficiency, it also represents a greater single point of failure. Organizations using this type of tool therefore still use point solutions as agents and also as a backup in case the main toolset fails.

Дата добавления: 2014-12-23