REDWOOD CAPABILITIES

[#1]

Good Day Folks,

My background in scheduling has been with Maestro, Tivoli, CA Unicenter and Control-M in which I am certified.  I was brought on board by my company to centralize their very large and multi-platform scheduling environment.  They are using CPS to schedule their SAP and AS400 environments.  Along with those already mentioned, they also have multiple Windows, Unix and Linux servers as well running a variety of applications.  So by default, I am looking at Redwood as my Enterprise scheduling tool.

But not being familiar with Redwood and its capabilities, I have run into some hurdles that I hope I can get answers to.  The first thing that I noticed is that I am unable to see job flows from end to end.  What I mean is that we have schedules out there that run multiple jobs across multiple platforms.  I have yet to come up with a solution to graphically display that end to end work flow on a monitor.  What I am looking for is a way that operations can look to see what the upstream and downstream jobs are should something fail.  Does anyone know if this is possible?

Secondly, I have found that the auditing on jobs is either missing or I am just not seeing it.  Case in point, I was contacted by my Help Desk about a job that failed.  They asked me if I could look into it.  I investigated the failure and found that the job had been "Killed".  Now unless I am mistaken, a Kill is initiate by a person - 99 percent of the time via the Redwood GUI.  In the past, with the other scheduling software that I have worked with, when an individual Kills a job, their employee number, name or some identifiable tag is associated with the Kill task.  With Redwood, I could not find any kind of information about who killed the job which I found amazing and somewhat disturbing.  Does Redwood have the auditing capability to inform a person whether they killed a job, put a job on hold, released a held job, etc.?

And my last question, which is probably rhetorical in nature but I'll ask it anyway, is there a way that I can see the health of the entire scheduling Enterprise on one screen using Redwood?  With other scheduling software, using a tree view, I could list ever server and/or application out there in the Enterprise and then drill down on any given server to see the schedules and jobs running on it.  I see that Redwood has a “Monitor Tree” but that really only gives me information Health Information which is nice but not very useful to operations. 

My goal is to make sure Redwood viable Enterprise scheduling solution.  A solution that is “friendly’ enough to be understood and used by the operations folks to monitor the health of our Enterprise scheduling environment.  Any suggestions or comments are and will be greatly appreciated.  Thank you.

[gmblom]

Hello Greg,

The way to filter jobs is by using job filters. You can setup different job filters to select the jobs the operators might be interested in. To group jobs you should put them in an Application. This way you can very easy distinguish to what type of job the failing job belongs. Applications are also very useful for filtering and promoting objects thought the landscape.

You can also setup Job Chains to monitor your jobs end-to-end.

There is one place where jobs can end up in a Killed state when they are not manually interrupted by an end user and this is when the job is interrupted in the remote system (ie SAP (cancelled), this is then synchronized back to CPS. To find out who manually interrupted the job look at the Last Modified By field on the job. This will only show the last modification which is ok here. If you want to audit all changes a (licensed) auditing module exists that allows you to setup specific audit rules.

You can setup Dashboards that monitor things in your system (metrics taken from the Monitor tree).

Based on your history you have mainly be involved with schedulers that work with a daily schedule plan. CPS works with a continuous schedule (time windows and submit frames), you will have to adjust your thinking a little bit sometimes to get the best results.

If you have any other questions let me know.

Regards Gerben