IT-Conductor Job Scheduling
Goals
- Evaluate effort needed to enhance IT-Conductor so it can meet Mission-critical Enterprise Job Scheduling functional requirements
Background and strategic fit
- A customer expressed interest in evaluating IT-Conductor to replace BMC CONTROL-M
- This is a good overall fit for IT-Conductor message and target audience
Assumptions
Requirements
| # | Title | User Story | Importance | Notes | Effort ~ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | SFTP Adapter | Support sftp file transfer from/to internal and external sources to Gateway server (Adapter) | MUST HAVE |
| 40 h |
| 2 | File Watcher | Support adapter-based mechanism for verification of file(object) existence, size (and date  ) | MUST HAVE |
| 70 h |
| 3 | Conditional Branching | Support process branching based on Matching a pattern in execution/job log | MUST HAVE |
| 50 h |
| 4 | Scheduling | Support Calendars and Formulae-based scheduling for Process Instantiation | MUST HAVE |
| 25 h |
| 5 | Hybrid Architecture | Due to cloud nature of IT-Conductor the public network reliability impact on mission-critical need to be mitigated by supporting short-term (up to a day) disconnected mode of operations | PREFERABLE |
| 230 h |
| 6 | Total Estimate | 415 h |
User interaction and design
Questions
Below is a list of questions to be addressed as a result of this requirements document:
| Question | Outcome |
|---|---|
| Native integration with SAP Job scheduler for ECC/CRM/BW applications through BAPI/RFC interface and it should have all SAP job scheduling attributes for configuring and submitting jobs to SAP application | In IT-Conductor, adding the additional attributes supported by SAP XBP interface is simple and quick, I did not include it as a separate item |
Native integration with Windows/Linux/Unix OS to run batch or shell scripts etc. | IT-Conductor currently supports the execution of OS commands via SSH and WinRS (Windows Remote Shell feature of OS). The commands can be batched with the flow behaving based on the specific shell functionality. IT-Conductor also has simple "wrappers" (extended class) for SSH/WinRS jobs so the parameters only include the script path. This is performed without the requirement of the local agent. |
| Trap error/successful status and provide values to the variables associated with it | First of all activity (job) dependencies are handled differently from control-m - they are unique between process element - no need to create in/out conditions with names and dates. Different types of dependencies are satisfied based on Completion status, Single Job properties or search criteria as well as passing values from one job to another. Probably 99% of the requirements can be satisfied without use of variables at all. Values from job output can be extracted using several methods - we have special types of activities that use REGEX to extract either tabulated data and create corresponding IT-Conductor objects or extract singular values and populate custom activity properties that can be passed on to the dependents. |
| Handling AUTO_EDIT variable features in Job configuration | IT-Conductor supports multiple mechanism for variablization: process level variables, shared job contexts etc. There are two classes of variables - Substitutions - these are resolved on Instantiation (like User Daily - when Process Definition (with all included activities) is instantiated and run-time instance is created) or Dynamic variables that resolved dynamically during process execution |
| Writing details of Job output to text file | IT-Conductor supports job output delivery it via e-mail, FTP, SMB or NFS |