Since V4R4, AS/400 owners have been improving the efficiency and accuracy of their operations by automating job submissions on their systems with the IBM Advanced Job Scheduler for AS/400. It can run jobs on request, as a result of some system or network event, or on almost any sort of regular or irregular schedule. Schedules can take into account holidays, fiscal calendars, and the availability of system resources. Users can send regular or exception notifications from jobs using a variety of methods, including paging. They can also distribute job output automatically to any AS/400 user in the network; from a central system, users can submit jobs across the entire AS/400 network. And finally, the Advanced Job Scheduler can provide information for documenting business processes and forecasting upcoming work.

That sounds like quite a claim for what appears to be a relatively new product. However, the product is not new. For V4R4, IBM rebranded what had been called the IBM Job Scheduler for AS/400 and added several important enhancements. These enhancements include an Operations Navigator plug-in that provides a graphical user interface (GUI), integration with Management Central, and support for submitting jobs to remote systems via TCP/IP. In V4R4, the Advanced Job Scheduler is included on the OS/400 system software media and is available for a 60-day trial.

The What, When, Where, and How of Scheduling

With the Advanced Job Scheduler, you can automatically launch any function that you could submit as a job. This function can be something as complex as a multisystem, core business application suite or as simple as a single CL command. For example, you could launch a nightly backup with a Save Library (SAVLIB) command, or you could send several PING commands to systems in your network and automatically page a network administrator if any system does not respond.

With the scheduler, you can launch jobs manually or based on a schedule, or they can be dependent on some other system or network event. With time-based scheduling, jobs can run at repeated intervals; on specific dates and times; or on particular days of the week, month, or fiscal period. You can even define which days of the week are working days in order to support schedules such as “the last working day of each month.” You can also create calendars to define fiscal periods, company holidays, or frequently used run

schedules. With the holiday calendars, you can specify for each holiday whether to skip the job, run it as scheduled, or run it on an alternate date. You can then further refine run schedules by specifying date and time ranges. For example, you can schedule a job to run hourly but only between 5:00 p.m. and 7:00 a.m.

Dependency-based scheduling also provides a rich set of options for alternate jobs, job groups, job dependencies, and resource dependencies. For example, a schedule can specify that an alternate job should run if the regular job ends abnormally. In that case, the alternate job might call a replacement function and then perform some type of cleanup or additional notification. You can create a job group to define an ordered set of jobs that run sequentially. The first job in the sequence has the schedule information that launches the group. If any job in the group fails, none of the remaining jobs will run until the group is relaunched at the next scheduled time.

There are several additional methods for controlling sequences based on job dependencies. One is to describe predecessor and successor job relationships. For example, you can specify JOB3 as a successor that will run only after JOB1 and JOB2 have completed normally. This same JOB3 can also be a predecessor to JOB4 and JOB5, where JOB4 will run after JOB3 completes normally and JOB5 will always run after JOB3 finishes, whether JOB3 finishes normally or abnormally.

And there’s even more. You can make the launching of a scheduled job dependent on the availability or status of various system resources. The dependency can be the existence of any system object or certain object properties. For example, you can specify that a file must exist, that it must have records, or that an exclusive allocation level (*EXCL) must be available. In addition to objects, the launching of a job can be dependent on the status of various communication components, the existence of a network file, or whether a particular subsystem is active.

Finally, the Advanced Job Scheduler can launch jobs on the local system or on any other system in the network where the product has been installed and started. Distributed Data Management handles system-to-system communications. Therefore, starting with V4R4, there is support for remote jobs in TCP/IP networks in addition to the SNA support

found in previous releases.

Interfaces

There are three interfaces to most of the Advanced Job Scheduler functions: a 5250 workstation, CL commands, and a graphical interface via Operations Navigator. To get to the main product menu on a 5250 workstation, type GO JS on a command line. If you prefer to enter CL commands directly, there are currently over 20 that are supported by the product. The following CL command is an example of a command that would be used to set up a scheduled job called PINGTEST, which regularly PINGs two systems and pages the network administrator in an abnormal situation. The command is as follows:

ADDJOBJS JOB(PINGTEST) SCDCDE(*MINUTES) +
ITVMIN(60) RANGE((1800) (0600)) +
DAY( *MON *TUE *WED *THU *FRI) +
CMD(PING RMTSYS(SYSTEM1) +
MSGMODE(*QUIET *ESCAPE)) +
ADLCMD(‘PING RMTSYS(SYSTEM2) +
MSGMODE(*QUIET *ESCAPE) ‘) +
PGRRCPABN(NETADMIN ‘“Abnormal response to PING”’)

When the Operations Navigator (OpsNav) plug-in is installed for the Advanced Job Scheduler on a Client Access workstation, an expandable entry for the product will appear in the OpsNav tree under Job Management. There are nodes in the tree for Scheduled Jobs, Job Groups, and Scheduled Job Activity. Right-clicking will bring up context menus for tasks such as creating calendars, changing defaults, and creating new jobs. Figure 1 shows

the OpsNav main menu and the Schedule page of the New Scheduled Job dialog for graphically specifying the PING example I described.

If the plug-in is installed on a workstation where Management Central is being used, the Advanced Job Scheduler will automatically replace the basic Management Central scheduling dialogs with richer scheduling capabilities for many systems management tasks, such as distributing objects and files, distributing PTFs, collecting inventory information, and issuing commands to groups of systems.

A Wealth of Information

If you have a paging product installed on your AS/400, you can configure the Advanced Job Scheduler with the command for sending a page. Then, on each scheduled job, you can specify the pager names and text strings for both normal and abnormal completion messages.

The Advanced Job Scheduler also supports methods of managing the distribution of reports and their associated spool files to one or more recipients. When a job runs, the scheduler can automatically distribute spool files to multiple recipients on the same AS/400 or on any other AS/400 in the network. You can even specify the days on which the report will be sent. What’s more, you can limit the distribution of certain reports in a job to a set of authorized recipients; however, you can distribute other reports more generally. Finally, you can identify the report recipients individually or by a variety of organizational associations.

The scheduler also maintains histories and logs. Completion histories show when a scheduled job ran, how long it took, and its completion status. The logs provide detailed information on all the scheduler activities and decisions. The user can print a variety of reports on the job histories as well as a report that forecasts which jobs will be submitted in the future and when these submissions will occur.

How to Learn More

Information on the Advanced Job Scheduler is abundant on the Web. You can find a detailed description of the functions available in the Job Scheduler through the AS/400 Online Library at publib.boulder. ibm.com/html/as400/onlinelib.htm. First, select a language. Then, press GO! and select V4R4/Category bookshelves for V4R4/Day-to-Day Operations. Under the SystemView heading, you will find links to both HTML and PDF versions of Job Scheduler for OS/400 for V4R2 (SC41-5324-00).

If you are interested in trying the product, which includes both the AS/400 code as well as the client plug-in, you can find it on the same media that you used to install V4R4 of OS/400. Load the media, enter GO LICPGM from an AS/400 command line, select option 11 on the Work with Licensed Programs menu, and then select option 1 on the Install Licensed Programs menu, next to product 5769JS1. This will install the AS/400 code as well as place the plug-in code into the QIBM directory. You will have 60 days to evaluate the product from the time you first use it.

The plug-in can be installed on your client using the Client Access selective setup function. For more details, go to the AS/400 information center at publib.boulder.ibm.com/html/as400/infocenter.htm. Select V4R4 and a language. Next, press GO! and, on the next panel, select Search; enter Job Scheduler as the search term. A link to several technical topics will appear, including the installation instructions.

One other site of interest is the Job Scheduler for AS/400 Frequently Asked Questions page at www.as400.ibm.com/jscheduler/ faqs.htm. This page will give you an idea of the richness of the product and may even answer a practical question or two for you.

References and Related Materials

• AS/400 Information Center: publib.boulder.ibm.com/html/as400/infocenter.htm

• AS/400 Online Library: publib.boulder.ibm.com/html/as400/onlinelib.htm
• Job Scheduler for AS/400 Frequently Asked Questions page: www.as400.ibm.com/jscheduler/faqs.htm

Figure 1: Here is an Operations Navigator view of the Advanced Job Scheduler.