Nov 29 2008 2:32PM GMT
Posted by: Yusuf Salwati
Project management,
Productivity,
Competitive advantage
Event Automation - Reducing “Slack” Time In Operations:
ActiveBatch® is an event driven job scheduling solution that allows jobs and job plans to be triggered by events such as file creation, modification, deletion, system startup, runaway processes or thousands of events that can be managed by our full support of the Microsoft Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) and or SNMP trapping.
ActiveBatch supports File Triggering on both Microsoft Windows as well as Non Windows systems including Linux, UNIX or OpenVMS upon the creation, modification or deletion of a specific file.
Multiple event triggers can be set up on jobs and job plans so that jobs are triggered based on events, a specific date and time, or even from previous jobs that have failed or succeeded in operation. ActiveBatch allows the job designer to create powerful job flows to take advantage of event based capabilities for the intended business process.
No longer will jobs “wait” for startup as ActiveBatch reduces the amount of “Idle” time previously built into other job scheduling systems by triggering workflows on Events such as File creation, modification or deletion on Windows, UNIX, Linux or OpenVMS systems, or on the completion status of a predecessor job or workflow. ActiveBatch can check for exit status and determine the appropriate job to trigger based on conditional flows. ActiveBatch allows for event based jobs to have expected run times so that they can be monitored or even allow for alerts to be sent to people on whom the job is waiting to release a file or initiate an action. The bottom line is that ActiveBatch helps IT to leverage the business unit with improved service levels.
ActiveBatch allows for events based jobs to gain visibility for operations by their inclusion in Daily Activity or Run Books allowing for “Expected Event Times” to be published so that these jobs and workflows can be identified when problems arise.
ActiveBatch Alerts can triggered when an expected event does not occur within a specified time window. With ActiveBatch you can, as an example, alert a vendor or supplier, that the system is waiting for their action or a file.
ActiveBatch job scheduling software can also interrogate data by using Active Variables and allow specific data to be used as an alternative approach to an event based job trigger. Within ActiveBatch, Active Variables can be used between jobs so that data is passed throughout the business process. Some examples of Active Variables are:
* Date Expression
* File Contents
* SQL Record Set
* Web Service Request Result
* WMI Query
* XML Query
* File System Information
In addition to ActiveBatch’s event based capabilities, ActiveBatch incorporates powerful date and time scheduling allowing either calendar scheduling or fiscal year scheduling. Jobs can be associated with one of more schedules that provide highly granular scheduling details for the greatest flexibility. Business calendars can be associated with jobs or job plans so days may be excluded and identified for previous or next day scheduling, or allow them to run based on the next scheduled date.