JAMS Feature Tour with Robert Newman
Take a Tour of the Top Job Scheduling Features
The robust feature set in JAMS ensures that your critical workloads execute reliably, run securely, conform to complex business logic, and adapt to new requirements.
In this condensed feature tour, our technical team will cover the most popular JAMS features, including:
- Full Job Monitoring and Control
- Management-Focused Design
- Tight Security and Native Auditing
- Flexible Parameters and Scheduling Options
Learn how the features in JAMS make it easy to bring enterprise standards to your processes.
JAMS is our focus today, but it’s always good to know that here at Fortra we offer a suite of products including the ones you see here. I like to say that with our product suite you really can solve any IT problem you might have. We are a global company with dedicated JAMS team offices in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, that offer 24/7 JAMS support and our support team has deployed JAMS to hundreds of customers worldwide. You can see a small sample of our customers here. It’s a general rule that you’re going to interact with a JAMS customer today, whether you’re watching a show on a Vizio TV, maybe building a bird feeder with Milwaukee Power Tools, checking the forecast with AccuWeather, or going for a run in new Nike sneakers.
We also have an incredibly strong partner network as you can see here and it’s important to note that here at the JAMS team, everything we do is for your success. From incorporating your needs directly into our development cycle to offering professional services and support services that jump-start your automation. And, now we’ll turn the presentation over to one of our rock star JAMS support engineers, Rob Newman.
Thanks Cody and welcome everybody. JAMS is made up of two main components. The first is the JAMS scheduling engine and we can configure this for high availability in an active/passive mode. So if you ever have a data center go down, your critical jobs are still going to run and complete successfully. Now the primary engine is the brains of the entire operation. This is where your schedule is managed, your dependencies are checked, and notifications are sent from. The second component is the JAMS agents. We can install these across multiple operating systems and platforms regardless of whether they’re hosted on premise or in the cloud. And this gives you the ability to link your processes across platforms and to your cloud operations.
Now, jobs can be set to run on the primary engine, but in most cases these jobs will be offloaded to your remote JAMS agents. It’s these agents that do all the heavy lifting on the remote machines. They execute and monitor the jobs, capture log information and statistics, and communicate all of that information back to the primary engine in real time. All JAMS objects are stored in Microsoft SQL database backend. Let’s jump over to the JAMS client, and this is where you can see a list of shortcuts or favorites. This provides administrators with an easy way to regulate the views or shortcuts each end user sees, allowing them to focus on the pieces of JAMS that matter to them most. You can base the available shortcuts on many factors like the user’s role or department. And, themes can also be used to mitigate the probability that end users will make changes in incorrect environments.
So the first shortcut here is our home shortcut. This is where we have a list of common activities that will allow you to quickly perform common tasks. And, the explore JAMS section contains our technology based categories and available tasks. And, as you can see from this list, JAMS is a cross platform scheduler. You can run your jobs on your Linux/Unix servers, your Windows servers, as well as other operating systems like OpenVMS, iSeries, JD Edwards, Ellucian Banner, and many more. And, each of these job types comes with the most effective job editor for their function. These include text-style editors for native syntax like SQL and batch commands, PowerShell, SSIS, Python and more. And, we also have our fill in the blank job types for things like file transfer, SQL stored procedures, SSIS packages, PeopleSoft, SAP chains and Banner. And, this is where information is automatically populated and available within the forms.
We also have a couple of execution methods specifically for linking multiple jobs together. The first is our sequence and we can run cross platform jobs, independent sequential order, so your ETL job can rely on the completion of a Linux process. By default, a sequence will halt if any step completes unsuccessfully. So your ETL job won’t run if your Linux process encounters an error. And, we also have our workflow execution method. This is a more developer focused option where you can add additional results are rules based logic to your workflow business process.
Jumping over to the JAMS monitor, this view provides you with a holistic view of everything currently happening within JAMS. This is where you can monitor all of your job statuses from a single view. Here you can review and manage jobs that are currently executing, waiting on dependencies, waiting to be released, and jobs that are scheduled to execute. And, JAMS offers a variety of useful details and metrics, including who submitted a job, how long the job has been running, the final status of any recently completed jobs, and more. Additionally, you can customize these views to suit your needs and you can also filter based on any of the columns. You also have full control over all the jobs within this view, which includes canceling or restarting jobs, rescheduling jobs, as well as releasing jobs on hold.
The monitor gives you quick access to the job log for each job. Logging is recording the standard out and standard error based information and from here you can also view various details about the job, including the job’s basic information, as well as any audit trail logging from that submission. Folders allow you to store any type of job in any folder. The folder structure is designed to make it easy for you to manage all of the jobs in any environment. Base properties and schedules and security can be set on a folder, which will then be inherited by any trial jobs or folders. Folders also give you the ability to globally and granularly control access to jobs by setting security at the folder level. This can be overwritten on the job level. Folders also give you the ability to bulk manage how jobs run, like update in the data warehousing folders so that every job runs on a new machine or setting up an alert on the critical nightly folder to notify the on call team if any of the jobs run into an issue.
You can also assign credentials at the folder or the job level. JAMS stores and encrypts usernames and passwords that your users can utilize for job execution, if they’ve been given access to those credentials. This means you can join the rest of our customers and retire the practice of granting elevated account permissions or exposing private passwords to try and run processes. Credentials support friendly display names for promotability with the actual log on as ID and the password, and additionally you can set up a public and private keys if needed.
Jumping over to our audit trail. This allows you to view any changes to any objects within the JAMS environment. This includes a list of revisions, times of the changes, who made the changes, as well as the changes highlighted in red. And, if a user inadvertently deletes or changes a job, you’re able to revert back to the previous iteration of that job definition, which means you don’t need to rebuild things from scratch.
Now let’s go take a look at one of our top features, parameters. This is where you can parse dynamic values in at submission time. They can be used to create template style jobs that will run dynamically based on the values you supply. You can format your jobs for seamless promotability, which gives your organization a streamlined method to promote jobs from dev. to prod. or even copy jobs between environments. And, if I submit this job you can see how this can be used as a fill in the blank form to insert additional data without your users ever having to touch the job’s source code.
We do have quite a number of scheduling options. These provide you a set of instructions for how a job behaves within JAMS. Such as, running a job on a schedule trigger. Our use of natural language simplifies job scheduling through terms and words used in everyday search, speech, so you can type out third Friday of the month or use terms like daily, work days, et cetera. Many of our customers have been able to retire the need to create and maintain custom and conventional calendars through this natural language alone. However, you also have the ability to create flexible calendars in JAMS, so you can schedule based on your company holidays or fiscal quarters. And, of course, you can have multiple schedules on a single job, which means less job definitions for you to manage.
Another scheduling feature is running jobs based on an email trigger. This is often used to monitor shared inboxes, handle ticketing, and other self-service type job submissions without exposing the client. So instead of emailing an operator to ask for a job submission, a user could fill out an internal form that kicks off an email and the JAMS job, saving time and resources. With recurrences you can set a job to run again automatically and define the delay based on the start, scheduled, or end time of the previous running instance. If you have a job that needs to run every two hours during the day, you won’t have 12 jobs defined, just one JAMS job with a recurrence.
We can also define file dependencies using a Windows path, a UNC share, or a path on a Linux Unix machine. These accept Wildcard values or global JAMS variables for dynamically driven file names. We can even specify the file presence option, whether the file is present or available, meaning no one else has a lock on the file, or how about the absence of a file. We can define notifications that can be based on the final status of your jobs or smarter options based on what JAMS knows about the job. You can define a runaway and base it on elapsed time or percentage running threshold. We also have stalled notifications and even a short limit. So if you have a job that takes ten minutes to run and it finishes in two minutes, you know that’s too good to be true and you can notify your staff to handle the issue.
We also have multiple methods to control the load you place on your machines, such as batch ques to balance the machine use and job limits for an individual agent or group of agents you can define. These can be assigned at both the folder or the job level. Our connection stores allow you to combine a target machine and a credential for seamless connectivity to your Oracle instances, file servers, SQL machines and more. And, these are reusable at both the folder and the job level and with friendly display names, this allows for easy promotion between your environments.
And, of course, there are many other features in JAMS that just won’t fit into this short session. These include a fully featured web client that gives you access to all of your JAMS environments, without the need to install software. They can even access JAMS from a phone or tablet if they’re away from the office. You get insight into the daily job schedule and load on your machines throughout the week with our projected schedule view. Our dashboard and report designers, with report delivery options that will handle all of your reporting needs to ensure that your director’s weekly job report is in their inbox at 5:00 AM on Monday. And, JAMS also ships with Windows Task Scheduler and SQL Agent job converters, and we even have a converter for your Cron jobs.
Now, we’ve covered quite a few topics today, including how the JAMS architecture makes it easier for your admins to manage, how the monitor and alerts give your operators everything they needed to keep things running smoothly, and how the robust scheduling options in JAMS give you the power to run any cross platform processes when, how, and where you want them to run. Now, before we end I want to let you know about our support site, support.jamscheduler.com, with this site you can register to submit and update tickets. You can even get more detailed one on one discussion on any of these features with a trained JAMS engineer. You may even get to talk to me.
Fantastic. Thanks for all that so far, Rob. We’ll go to questions here. I’ll just remind everybody that the questions section is over on the right hand side of your screen. Feel free to submit those as we go and I apologize in advance for paraphrasing any of the questions that we’ve gotten in here.
So the first question I have for you, Rob, was that a drop down the list in the job submission that you showed?
Yes it was. So let’s go back, open the job. Actually, let’s actually submit the job and you will see that you can add validated dropdown lists for your users to choose from to ensure that the right inputs, the right values, are getting submitted with your jobs.
Great. The next question that I see here, in the schedule you only showed some options. Could you go over all the options?
Sure. We have quite a number of scheduling options. We can run this job based on a schedule, after another job, on a regular interval, forever. We can base it on a file trigger, a variable, an email that comes into a specified email box. We can also add reoccurrences for these jobs, we can set these jobs to be dependent upon other jobs, jobs on specific dates. How about pre checking another job for additional information? Or, a file dependent in a specific location, a variable changed or added, resources and time windows telling you exactly when these jobs should or should not run. We can set job statuses, as explained that to things like runaway, short or stalled. Hey, if it’s taking too long to run, let us know. And, when events occur, we can send emails, we can run a specific notification job. And, of course, we can also send reports upon job completions, as well.
Great. The next question I have here, what’s the difference between a trigger and a dependency?
All right, so a trigger is a perpetually running process. It waits for our job, it waits for a file to come into a specific location, it triggers the job. The job, what it needs to do, does what it needs to do, and then removes that file, resets the trigger, or it goes back and again looks for that file to come in that place, in a never ending fashion. A file dependency is more of a scheduled process. Schedule the job to run at 8:00 AM, dependent upon a file in a location. When that file comes in, the job executes, does what it needs to do, and then goes to sleep until the next scheduled iteration of that job.
Fantastic. All right. I’m seeing a few more questions here, but these are outside of the normal scope of this webinar. So if you do have a question that we did not answer, we will respond to you after this webinar is over. Thank you again, Rob. This has been really informative and thank you all for joining us today.
If you’re looking for more information on how to bring enterprise features to your job scheduling, I encourage you to get in touch with our team. If you’re new to JAMS, remember you can start a trial at any time by downloading the latest version of JAMS right from our main site. And, that download is going to give you everything that you need to get up and running. And, that does include ways to contact our support team members, like Rob, and links to training materials. So thank you all again for joining us and have a great day. Thank you, Rob.
Thank you.