Using Schedule Manager › Reasons to Use the Schedule Manager

Reasons to Use the Schedule Manager

Using the CA OPS/MVS Schedule Manager facility, you can schedule the desired state of one or more resources by date, by day of the week, or by time of day.

Being able to schedule the desired state of resources enables you to automatically configure them at any time, including system IPL time, when batch job schedules may not be active. The only requirement is that CA OPS/MVS be active. You can define many alternate configurations of system resources into one or more Schedule Manager schedules. Some examples of alternate system configurations are:

• Shift changes
• Company holidays
• Weekend test time
• Disaster recovery mode

The benefits of using the Schedule Manager to manage the state of system resources are:

• No time-of-day (TOD) rules are used. This eliminates the need to code sophisticated catch-up logic.
• Sophisticated rules or REXX routines no longer need to be created to verify what is running.
• Schedules are created and maintained through ISPF.
• Recovery from unplanned system outages is automatic. The Schedule Manager configures your system resources in the proper state no matter what date, day of the week, or time of day the unplanned outage occurs. You do not need to manually verify what should be active and what should be inactive.

  For example, if certain printers defined to System State Manager need to be available only during regular working hours (such as Monday through Friday between 7:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m.), then you can use the Schedule Manager to change the desired state of those printers to DOWN between 8:00 p.m. and 7:00 a.m. on weekdays and all day on Saturday and Sunday. You can also have the Schedule Manager automatically change the desired state of the printers back to UP on Monday through Friday morning at 7:00 a.m.

  It is possible to manually override Schedule Manager control of specific resources while maintaining usual scheduled control over remaining resources. Using the example above, if a printer needed to be UP for an hour at noon on a Saturday, then various mechanisms in the Schedule Manager exist to allow the printer to be brought UP without having to unload the active schedule.

Note: The Schedule Manager is not a batch job scheduler.