Linux and UNIX
Linux and UNIX - It's Time To Replace Cron
So you’re using Cron. You are putting up with the fact that you don’t
have flexible calendars so when you don’t want a job to run on a holiday,
you need to go in there and manually stop jobs from running. You don’t have
any way of tying jobs together in a workflow across multiple servers and applications
so you can see how various processes interact with one another. If a Cron job fails,
you don’t have any way of alerting appropriate personnel or kicking off related
processes that could address the issue. If you want to run the same job on dozens
of different servers, you need to go to each server, log in, create a Cron tab entry,
test, and debug. We could go on and on but you get the picture.
With JAMS in place, you will have access to the most
comprehensive job scheduling and workload automation
solution.
- Manage all of your jobs from one central monitor.
- Notifications and alerts when jobs fail, hang, run too long, etc.
- Create workflows to see how various jobs and applications interact with one another
- Event-based scheduling so that jobs run
based upon various activities like when a file transfer occurs
- Comprehensive and detailed audit history to see which jobs ran, who ran the jobs,
any changes that have been made to the schedule, etc.
- And more
Best of all, JAMS has a Cron Conversion Utility which takes existing Cron jobs and
turns them into JAMS jobs. Once the job is converted into JAMS, you can take advantage
of all of the capabilities and functions within JAMS.
Stop using prehistoric tools and start leveraging the most powerful
job scheduling system on the market - JAMS.
Our customers often ask if they should use a JAMS Agent on their
Linux and UNIX Servers or if they should connect
to these servers using SSH. With JAMS, you can do either or both but here is our
take.
- Using a JAMS Agent, the job can contain a script rather than a series of commands.
(i.e. , if statements, while loops, etc). The SSH execution method isn’t able
to run a job as though it was a script; it runs it line by line as if one were typing
it into the command line. JAMSAgentX runs jobs as a shell script; running it as
a script makes it act the way most people expect. That’s the main purpose
of the JAMS Agent.
- The File-based Trigger mechanism requires a JAMS Agent to be installed.
- Better exception capturing of the job processes are provided by a JAMS Agent.
- Reliability. With SSH, if something fails which causes the JAMS server to disconnect,
the job fails. With a JAMS Agent installed locally, the job continues and JAMS reconnects
as if nothing ever happened.
