4 IT AUTOMATION CHANGES YOU CAN EMPLOY, RIGHT NOW
Once you’ve experienced the efficient cadence that goes along with smart workload automation and service orchestration, it’s difficult to imagine life without it. Employing best practices when you define a batch process can save you hours of time in the future. JAMS is designed to help enterprises maintain good habits across every batch process on every platform, but you can get started right now with these proven changes.
Not every scheduling tool has these features. (That’s why so many enterprises turn to JAMS.) But, by making these incremental changes, you’ll be better prepared for a growing schedule of mission critical batch processes.
1. Replace timed jobs with triggered jobs.
The day you say, “This 3:00 PM batch job should succeed most of the time,” is the day you should start thinking about triggers. When you first develop a workload automation schedule, it can be easy to assume that you can cushion the start time of batch jobs by configuring them to run at certain times. As time goes on, you might adjust that time to allow for a precedent to run a little bit longer. But, that doesn’t resolve the real issue – that the clock is a weak tool in today’s real-time, responsive business environment. Triggers don’t care what time it is. They dutifully kick off jobs at the right time. If you’ve adjusted the timing of a job more than a few times, it’s time to think differently.
2. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.
Batch jobs can fail for all kinds of reasons. As in sports, you’d be a fool not to go for a rebound when it really counts. Retries are an effective way ensure critical processes run reliably, especially when some external factor is interfering with their success. Maybe a necessary file hasn’t arrived on time or a network connection is down. Leveraging retry can mitigate job failure until you have time to dig in to a root cause.
3. Share your discoveries.
Don’t be that person that hides a job’s errors and failures. Add robust notifications to your automation routine so that you can resolve failures quickly. An effective notification…
- Lets business users know when jobs fail so they aren’t left in the dark.
- Exposes the log so that the job’s author can get to the root cause of the failure without hunting.
- Provides recovery instructions so that users can leverage known solutions to issues, or run jobs ad hoc.
- Integrates with monitoring and ITSM tools like SCOM, so that system-wide error trends can be discovered.
4. Keep control of changes.
Job definitions change over time. Sometimes those changes improve a job’s speed or reliability; sometimes they don’t. Source control enables you to roll back to previous working versions of a job to ferret out the changes (or authors) that have introduced slack or errors to a master schedule.
What other habits keep enterprise IT schedules running like clockwork?
Download our Job Scheduling Checklist to see an exhaustive list of what’s possible with a centralized workload automation solution.