The 6 Fundamentals of Workload Automation
A Glimpse at Workload Automation Fundamentals
Looking to better understand how workload automation (WLA) can help your organization centralize and automate critical processes in your business? This guide offers an overview of the six fundamentals of WLA and provides innovative ways to manage scheduled jobs in your organization. Use this guide to learn how workload automation enables you to:
- Unify jobs across multiple platforms and applications
- Leverage diagnostics to optimize performance
- Automatically identify and respond to jobs that could impact SLAs
- Enhance your alerting, notification, and auditing abilities
- Manage your environment more efficiently with variables and parameters
- Implement event-based scheduling to trigger jobs from files, emails, and other sources
#1: Unify Jobs Across Multiple Platforms and Applications
No business exists in a vacuum. Chances are, you have multiple applications in use right now on multiple platforms that don’t talk to each other. And you likely have multiple servers where those applications are running. The separation between applications, platforms, systems, departments, locations, and teams creates a siloed environment that requires manual intervention for these siloes to interact. One of the core principles of workload automation software is bringing all these things together so there is one centralized interface that handles automation across your entire IT infrastructure.
#2: Leverage Diagnostics to Optimize Performance
Understanding what is currently running and how it’s performing is essential across your environment. You need a single pane of glass where you can see how far along applications are in their normal runtime, and be able to look ahead and see what the schedule looks like later in the day, in the week, or in the month. An effective workload automation solution provides you solid information on everything that is running across your infrastructure, and then automatically generates projections for you on what’s going to run down the line.
#3: Automatically Identify and Respond to Jobs That Could Impact SLAs
Detecting problems that arise—and creating an immediate response to any of these possible failure points—is another fundamental concept in workload automation. This means, for example, that if a job finishes in a fraction of the time it should take, you can enable controls to indicate the job was unsuccessful. Going further, with an automatic response, you can re-run the job and take specific actions that respond to the failure. This not only reduces the amount of time you spend checking on jobs, but it also makes your jobs—and your schedule—more resilient. You should never have to spend time cleaning up because a network blip caused a job to fail. With workload automation, your jobs are smart enough to re-run themselves so you don’t have to manually respond.
#4: Enhance Your Alerting, Notification, and Auditing Abilities
Learning about how and when unique process events occur is extremely important, which is why workload automation solutions come with built-in options for alerting through email, SMS, and chat alerts to applications like Slack and Microsoft Teams. WLA also enables you to hook into third-party tools if desired. If a job does fail, workload automation keeps a record of that failure, so you know what happened and when. This auditing also extends to processes themselves and enables you to roll back to a previous version of a job’s definition when needed.
#5: Manage Your Environment More Efficiently With Variables and Parameters
A workload automation solution should make your entire environment easy to manage. Variables and parameters enable you to templatize jobs and pass key information between steps in a process. Rather than managing individual jobs for every iteration and overseeing dozens of one-off processes, you can manage one job definition that is running more intelligently with variables by setting and establishing those values at runtime.
#6: Implement Event-Based Scheduling to Trigger Jobs from Files, Emails, and Other Sources
While time schedules work effectively, the real key to workload automation is what, how, and why things run. Connecting jobs together in a logical sequence provides immediate benefit because you know the next job will not run until the current job has finished successfully. Eliminate manual file watching by setting a trigger to do it for you, and kick off the job once it sees a file in that folder.
Take a Deeper Look at JAMS: Our Industry-Leading Workload Automation Solution
JAMS is a centralized workload automation (WLA) solution that runs, monitors, and manages jobs and workflows that support critical business processes. Our WLA software saves enterprises time and money, reduces risk, helps meet compliance requirements, and maximizes the value of applications and platforms.
JAMS provides enterprise features to define, trigger, monitor, and audit jobs for their entire lifecycle. And our integrations give you centralized control, without the need for specialized scheduling knowledge on each platform your business uses.
Why Choose JAMS for Workload Automation?
JAMS is world-class workload automation software trusted by more than 1,000 customers across various industries. Named a Leader by G2, JAMS customers love:
- The flexibility: JAMS can meet the needs of any enterprise and can be used differently as business needs change
- The dependability: JAMS is reliable and robust, with alerting when a workflow fails for quick remediation
- The support: If you need help, JAMS support engineers are second-to-none