Automation tools for complex environments

This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, however readers should note it will likely favor the submitter's approach.

IT run books describe these process and dependencies, specifying how to perform such tasks as database maintenance, backup and recovery, and help desk procedures. These processes are critical to the data center's ability to operate efficiently, support business continuity if a disaster occurs and meet SLAs. But, the need for manual intervention makes them time-consuming and error-prone.

The best ways to lower IT costs

Application process automation is one of the best ways to lower IT costs, since it can significantly reduce manual efforts. Nevertheless with organizations running hundreds or thousands of applications -- and business processes spanning multiple departments, systems and servers -- implementing end-to-end automation can be difficult.

What's needed is a single automation platform capable of automating all processes, enterprisewide -- in physical, virtual and cloud environments. This approach will as well reduce operational costs, improve visibility and control across your entire IT landscape, and help ensure SLA compliance. And because your application landscape is always changing, the solution must be able to dynamically and rapidly integrate new business processes, applications and services into your automation strategy.

Job scheduling dates back to mainframe days, when all business activity was driven by batch transactions. Today, enterprises that however run batch jobs often need to intervene manually -- for instance, to set up new batch runs, review previous job output, verify the successful completion of dependent jobs, gather additional input data or initiate subsequent jobs.

In addition, the use of multiple computing platforms and business processes that run 24/7 make it harder to find windows of time to run batch processes. As a matter of fact, for maximum flexibility in meeting SLAs, you may not want jobs to run in a fixed batch window at all. Instead, you may want to schedule jobs dynamically, based on the occurrence of particular events -- for instance, the arrival of a file; a database event; or when disk space reaches a preset threshold. Standard scheduling tools simply cannot handle this degree of complexity.

To overcome these limitations, many organizations write custom code to submit and manage application processes, initiated by operating system schedulers just as CRON or Windows Task Scheduler. But, these solutions as a rule have limited functionality and are hard to manage. To streamline IT operations enterprise-wide and eliminate islands of automation, you need a job scheduler that provides true end-to-end processing.

Look for a job scheduling platform that works across all your computing platforms, encompasses calendar- and event-based scheduling, and supports both legacy schedulers and new applications.