Time-based scheduling with job planner

How to automate batch processing based on calendar rules

2 min

Jul 2, 2019 from Activeeon

Job planner allows to set up custom and recurrent execution of selected workflows based on calendar rules. You can schedule recurring jobs (i.e. every hour, every 1st day of the month, every week day, etc.) or even integrate with any other calendars (office holidays, maintenance days, etc.) to completely automate batch job execution. Once the rules are defined, the job planner offers a complete calendar visualization of all workflows scheduled per year, month, week or day.

Time-based scheduling : why using a job planner for IT workflow automation?

Based on calendar dates and rules, a job planner has a lot of advantages :

it helps you automate and schedule recurring jobs with workflows linked to custom calendars
you can visualize planned jobs by workflow, chronologically, on a standard calendar or with Gantt chart
you can see job execution status and history
it gives you an estimation of computation time

Job planner

ProActive Workflows & Scheduling solution from Activeeon includes a Job Planner portal, where you can schedule submission of your workflows at a specific time of the business week or month or year, defined through integrated calendars. Job Planner is accessible from the workflow editor studio using «plan» button. You can associate one or several workflows to a calendar, which can then be easily enabled or disabled. In order to configure a calendar that meets your business needs, i.e. you need to have an IT process automatically launched every monday or every first of the month, there is a specific space for such configuration using cron expressions.

Plan jobs using workflows associated to calendars

Job Planner allows to schedule the execution of any workflow from the catalog according to a selected calendar previously defined, with calendar association feature. The feature also allows to customize variables of a selected workflow, without changing the original template. The association of a workflow with a calendar can be disabled using unlink button. This means that the workflows won’t be submitted for next calendar occurencies. The view also offers information about the number of workflows associated to each calendar, and which of them are activated or paused.

Follow execution with Gantt view

The Gantt chart view allows you to visualize current execution, job history and planned jobs. From here, you can see the start time as well as the estimation of finish time, as well as pending, killed, cancelled or failed jobs. Color codes allow to better visualize each job status.