Getting Started with Job Management Manager › Steps Leading Toward Automation

Steps Leading Toward Automation

A major benefit of Job Management Manager is its ability to automate time-consuming and labor-intensive tasks. The first steps toward automation include:

• Understanding your own production schedules, dependency networks, and what must be automated
• Asking yourself what would happen if:
  • A job is run by mistake or out of sequence
  • A job does not run when you want it to
  • System time is set incorrectly
  • A dependency is removed from a job by mistake
• Devising a naming convention to let you use wildcards on groups of jobs across accounts
• Dividing jobs into steps so they can take advantage of FAILOVER/RESTART at a step
• Collecting commonly used functions into prefunctions and postfunctions that can be shared among jobs
• Modifying existing procedures to remove extraneous logic, such as for rescheduling, job dependency, or error notification
• Selecting error handling and job exiting status
• Using job dependencies and load balancing for "parallel processing"
• Putting some simple, non-critical jobs into the job database to become familiar with how the manager works
• Devising a logical grouping scheme that takes advantage of the "GROUP" and "TYPE" capabilities of manager, over and above the wildcard capability