Introducing Job & Automation Monitoring

When running the Hire to Retire process, users usually also need to schedule and run application jobs. It is Anna’s and Scott’s task as System Administrator and IT Support Engineer to avoid process disruptions, for example, by identifying aborted / failed jobs or jobs with exceptionally long runtimes.

Scott and Anna turn to Carl to ask how SAP Cloud ALM can support them to fulfill this task and how it can provide transparency regarding job executions and automated activities.

Carl states that SAP Cloud ALM includes Job & Automation Monitoring, which provides a central job monitoring solution for all SAP products to complement job scheduling. It gives transparency about the current status of the different automation processes regarding execution status, application status, start delay, and runtime.

Anna then wants to know how this is achieved. Carl answers that Jobs and other automations are executed in the managed cloud services and on-premise systems. The individual executions (such as start time, end time, and status) are captured by the local execution infrastructures. Customers can choose to forward the execution data to SAP Cloud ALM, where the individual execution data is assembled and correlated with definition data. This allows for future estimations based on historical data, such as the estimated runtime of jobs.

Scott and Anna begin to understand that Job & Automation Monitoring will help them to ensure business operations without disruption, and to increase business process execution quality and performance. Next, they ask Carl to explain the specific capabilities of the tool.

Carl explains that Job & Automation Monitoring will allow Scott and Anna to perform the following activities:

• Identify automations that produce exceptions or show exceptional behavior regarding runtime and delay.

• Drill-down into individual executions and forward-navigate to the managed cloud service.

• Receive alerts and notifications if there are issues with automations.

• Analyze background jobs/tasks regarding runtime and exception trends to understand deteriorations early and therefore avoid process disruption.

Before the meeting ends, Scott and Anna want Carl to show them some examples of Job & Automation Monitoring and to explain how to work with it.

Carl shows Scott and Anna the Overview page in Job & Automation Monitoring and explains how it provides information on the job and automation status of every service in scope. From here, Scott and Anna can drill down into the list of jobs that show exceptions or runtime issues and can drill down into the list of alert situations.

He points out that every job is rated based on its last execution regarding four metrics: execution status, application status, start delay and runtime. From here, they can drill down into the list of job executions to understand the status of former executions of failed jobs. Carl continues that alerting is offered for all the four metrics.

In addition, the Analysis view allows Scott and Anna to find out which job had the most executions, the most failures, the highest overall / average runtime, or even deteriorations regarding failures or runtime.

After this meeting, Scott and Anna are happy that Job & Automation Monitoring helps Dreams without Limits to ensure that automation processes across the different systems and services that are used in their Hire to Retire process are running successfully.