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Enterprise job scheduling with schedulix

Computing with a Plan

Article from ADMIN 31/2016

By Thomas Drilling

Cron is the simplest job scheduler on Unix and Linux systems, but if you are looking for an enterprise-level solution that offers unique, sophisticated sequencing and monitoring functions, schedulix might just fit the bill.

When IT people hear "enterprise job scheduling," they think of software tools for planning, controlling, monitoring, and automating the execution of mutually independent programs or processes. Although job scheduling always has been indispensable on mainframes and midrange systems, automatically controlled workflows are also quite popular on servers.

A job scheduling system can do far more than the Cron service, which simply acts as a timer to start processes. More than half of all mission-critical operations – starting with archiving, through backups and reports, to managing inventories – in companies throughout all branches of industry are designed to run as batch processes. According to a study by BMC, the vendor of an "agentless" scheduling solution, every single web transaction generates on average more than 10 batch processes [1].

To ensure stable operation of independent jobs, however, you need more functionality – for example, the ability to pass control information, to choose a monitoring option, or to request operator intervention. On top of this, resource control, parallel task processing, and distributed execution are all desirable. Little wonder, then, that products optimized in this way exist on the market, including IBM Tivoli Workload Scheduler [2], Entire Operations [3] by Software AG, or BMC's Control-M Suite [4]. All told, the number of available solutions with and without enterprise resource planning (ERP) support is not exactly small [5]. The programs cited here typically work across operating systems and can monitor and control the execution of programs on Windows, Unix, and Linux.

The product discussed in this article, schedulix

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