Synopsis:
Every IT department is well aware of the challenges associated with trying to coordinate
tasks across disparate technologies and solutions. Customer files coming in via
a Linux FTP server need to be ingested into a SQL database. Provisioning Active
Directory users requires too many manual steps across too many disparate systems.
New records in a Microsoft SQL database must trigger an action to occur in a middleware
system. Even the most configuration controlled IT organization must manage lots
of little products that somehow need to interact. Since IT technologies are rarely
in the habit of communicating seamlessly with one another, the use of so many disparate
technologies can create one unified (and massive) headache. Fortunately, that headache
can be alleviated with the use of automated job scheduling.
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Chapter 1:
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Do I Need Job Scheduling? Ten Questions to Ask Yourself
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Chapter 2:
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Seven Use Cases for Automating IT Job Scheduling
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Chapter 3:
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What Makes an IT Workflow? A Technical Description
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Chapter 4:
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Implementing Enterprise Job Scheduling: A Requirements Checklist
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Chapter 1: Do I Need Job Scheduling? Ten Questions to Ask Yourself
IT Job Scheduling is a task that every enterprise needs, as do many small and midsize
organizations. Does your business need job scheduling? In addition to exploring
the basics of job scheduling, this chapter offers a list of ten good questions about
your environment. The answers will help you determine whether your existing scheduling
tools are meeting the challenges that an enterprise job scheduling solution can
support.
Chapter 2: Seven Use Cases for Automating IT Job Scheduling
In Chapter 2, read seven use cases to help you understand the value-add of an IT
job scheduling solution and learn how job scheduling creates a framework for approved
execution that your auditors - and, indeed, your entire business - will truly appreciate.
Chapter 3: What Makes an IT Workflow? A Technical Description
In many ways, workflows, jobs, and plans represent different facets of the same
desire:
Telling a computer what to do. You can consider them the logical
representations of the "little automation packages" I referenced in the first two
chapters. Although I spent much of those chapters explaining why they're good for
your data center and how they'll benefit your distributed applications, I haven't
yet shown you what they might look like.
That's what you'll see in this chapter. In it, you'll get an understanding of how
a workflow quantifies an IT activity. You'll also walk through a set of mockups
from a model IT job scheduling solution. Those mockups and the story that goes with
them is intended to solidify your understanding of how an IT job scheduling solution
might look once deployed.
Chapter 4: Implementing Enterprise Job Scheduling: A Requirements Checklist
Purchasing and implementing an IT job scheduling solution nets you only an empty
palette within which you can create your own automations. Filling that palette to
meet the needs of your business is the next step. Once you've selected, purchased,
downloaded and incorporated into your infrastructure an IT job scheduling solution,
what do you have? With many solutions, not much. An IT job scheduling solution is,
at the end of the day, only what you make of it. Right out of the box, a freshly
installed solution won't immediately begin automating your business systems. Creating
all those "little automations" is a task that's left up to you and your imagination.
That's why finding the right IT job scheduling solution is so fundamentally critical
to this process. The right solution will include the necessary integrations to plug
into your data center infrastructure. The right solution comes equipped with a rich
set of triggers that bring infinite flexibility in determining when jobs are initiated.
Integrations, triggers and administration - these should represent your three areas
of focus in finding the solution that works for you.
Read About the Author:
Author Biography
Greg Shields of Realtime Publishers
