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Job Monitoring
Job Monitoring: System Informer or Sixth Sense?
Why employing the biggest snitch and know-it-all is
good for businessJob Monitoring - A Friend on the Inside
Imagine you had a friend that turned up right before something bad was going to happenand told you how to avoid it. It could be some small incident involving your shoe and asidewalk nasty, leading to flared nostrils and suspicious looks at the office all day. Or itcould be something much worse, like if you don't attend to that looping job silently goingabout its business, the system in India will fall over and the downtime will cost thecompany hundreds of thousands of dollars in idle work hours. Yes, a friendly forewarningwouldn't be bad in either situation. For the first, we suggest you watch where you treadand if that doesn't avoid the inevitable, flare your own nostrils with empathetic disgust andthrow a silent nod of blame to the work experience student. For the second, we wouldsuggest employing a job monitor - it's your friend on the inside.
Rebel with a Cause
At the user level, the systems powering the business applications need to be the everavailable, fully optimal, always-on magic behind the scenes that demands nothing of theuser and is devoted to a life of service, duly processing jobs efficiently, with a minimum offuss. As most System Managers would agree, when this utopian vision starts to frayaround the edges, a fair amount of finger pointing is levied at the system as the 'cause' ofissues that are felt directly on the user level, regardless of the user actions that may ormay not have contributed. The system, as such, is not necessarily to blame, it is onlyguilty of not controlling the rebellious jobs in its charge. Rebel jobs, when provoked, havethe potential to do things they should not. Rebel jobs loop, become inactive or gorgethemselves on temporary storage. Rebel jobs gang up to cause mischief and hide out inobscure subsystems where they can avoid detection.
System Managers may be well aware of the chaos rebel jobs cause, the evidence of theirrampage can be seen in user complaints, important jobs that do not run or resources thatare being consumed. The challenge for them is to get the inside track on how to identifyand round up the trouble makers before the damage is done. When faced with a system ornetwork containing hundreds of thousands of jobs, this can become a task ofoverwhelming proportions - in terms of time and money.
System iRapidunexplainedPayroll job consumption Normal Normal Normaldidn't run: of temporary Job Job JobUsers Angry staffcomplain storage: $$$system is Inactive Normal Normalslow: Job JobTimewasted Normal Normal LoopingJob Job
Which Jobs are causing Normal High CPU Normaleach of these problems? Job Job2Calculating the Cost
A system without an efficient means of identifying and resolving problematic jobs shiftsthe burden of these tasks onto what is likely an already stretched team. The team isforced to respond to problems as they occur and sift through the masses of jobs to findthe culprit and ultimately, resolve the issue. Jobs that go awry can so readily impact thesystem environment around them. Anomalies in these environmental conditions or inroutine processes involving the job often can be the first sign of job issues, that leftunchecked or unattended, add up to a significant financial loss over an annual period. Twoessential considerations for job monitoring include:
? Job Performance? Job Status
Case Study
Company x is a large Financial Services organization that is struggling with job issues ontheir centrally managed System i network. The network supports 21,000 users nationwideand the company generates $4.2 billion in revenues annually. In a review to outline theextent of this issue, they calculated the associated financial impact over the previousyear's operations. The cumulative effect of these problems throughout the network andthe impact on users' productive time was far more than they originally thought.
Area Problem Consequence CostTime consuming 1$2,700Job A looping job is consuming investigation andvast amounts of temporary additional disk isPerformance Annual Est:storage required to avert $13,700system crashConsistently high CPU Time consuming, 2usage as several jobs all have same $225,000Job QZDASOINIT jobs take name, which onesmore CPU than they should are causing Annual Est:Performance problem... [download for more]
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