As software professionals, we need our job schedulers to be reliable, easy to use and transparent.
When it comes to job schedulers, transparent means letting us know what is going on. We want to have available to us information such as when was the job scheduled to run, when did it start, when did it complete, which host ran it (in pool scenarios). We want to know if it failed, what the problem was. We want the option to be notified either being emailed, paged, and/or messaged when all or specific jobs fails. We want detailed information available to us should we wish to investigate problems in our executing jobs. And we want all of this without having to write code, create our own interface, parse log files or do extra configuration. The scheduler should just work that way.
We want our scheduler to be easy to use. We want an intuitive interface where we can control everything. Scheduling jobs, changing schedules, signing up for alerts, configuring workflow, investigating problems, previewing the runtime schedule of our environments, temporarily disable/re-enable pool participants, resubmit failed jobs, review job errors should all be at our fingertips and easy to use. The changes should take effect immediately in all pool participants and be logged. If we want to add/remove extra nodes based on load need, we should just be able to do so without any drama.
We want our scheduler to be reliable. It should participate in load balancing and fault tolerance without any extra work. It needs to notify us when something goes wrong. It needs to be incredibly fast so that it stays out of the way and lets the jobs run.
As you’re probably starting to see, to solve all these types of problems software long ago established using a single data store, typically a database. For reasons that are beyond me, job schedulers either don’t use a database or only provide it as an optional configuration setup, an afterthought. This is extremely short-sighted. By not driving your solution off a database, most of the needs identified above become impossible or at best, impractical. Even when used optionally, your job scheduler doesn’t provide the user interface that provides the easy access to the information you require. It’s like a reference book without an index or glossary. You can go find the information you want, but it will be much more work than it needs to be.
Carfey Software’s scheduler has all these features and more. Sign up for your trial licence now at www.carfey.com.