This eBook offers insight to conquering challenges associated with trying to coordinate tasks across disparate technologies and solutions
67-Page eBook for IT Professionals
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.
eBook Excerpt:
Underlying Jobs Make Business Intelligence Data Useable
A portion of the first business unit’s information comes from a partner company external to the data center. The second and third business units have projects in combination that require orchestration and synchronization between databases. The second business unit has further integrations into an e‐commerce server in order to gather a full picture of budget levels.
Business Intelligence solutions can indeed present a more‐unified view of data across different platforms, but they do not provide a mechanism to unify transactions between down‐level systems.
For Company D, creating that unified workflow lies within the realm of an enterprise IT job scheduling system. If gathering data is more complicated than simply gathering data, a job scheduling system ties together the entire system to accomplish what you really need.
eBook Excerpt
Multiple Protocols at Play, Each With It's Own Management
Data files are much different than XML files in Web transactions or emails back and forth through an email server. They’re larger, they can come in many different formats which create particular issues when you’re working with unstructured customers, and the management tools to work with them don’t necessarily integrate well into other formats and workflows.
You can imagine the protocols and file formats at play here: XML, SMTP, FTP and SFTP, along with a little SSH and SOAP to tie the pieces together. Complex needs require data transfer handling that can support the recognition that files have been downloaded. Such handling can either monitor for a file’s presence or use event‐ or message‐based notification. An IT job scheduling solution wraps file transfer logic into the larger workflow, enabling XML to trigger SSH, to fire off SMTP, and finally to invoke SOAP at the point the application requires.
eBook Excerpt
Reusing IT Jobs In a Plan; Reusing IT Plans in a Workflow
Reusability comes into play not only within each IT job but also within each plan. The boundary of an IT job must remain with the execution of an action. In the Integrated Jobs Library, is a collection of previously‐created jobs: Job 17 updates a database row, Job 27 opens a connection to a database, and so on.
Each of those discrete jobs can be assigned to a workflow for the purposes of accomplishing some task. They can also be strung together in infinite combinations to create a more‐powerful IT plan. Notice how Job 27 represents the beginning step of Plan 15; it also represents a middle step for Plan 22.
Once created, both jobs and plans reside in an IT job scheduling solution’s Integrated Jobs Library. From there, created jobs can be reused repeatedly as similar tasks are required. In the above figure, two new databases require synchronization. Since a plan has already been created to accomplish this task, reusing that plan elsewhere can be as simple as a drag‐and drop. After dragging to create a new instance of the plan, the only remaining activities involve populating that plan with new server characteristics.
