A typical IT department has to run and manage various types of workloads. Further, most of these happen to be mission-critical tasks that must be automated. Given the plethora of applications and services that need to be managed, job scheduling can easily become a challenge for IT administrators.
So it’s important to understand the recommended steps when it comes to automating IT workloads:
- Defining a plan: Clarity must be sought well before jobs are scheduled. This falls under creating a requirements plan that details out the workloads, the various processes they run, the resources they’ll compete for, as well as the order of priorities. Adequate time should be spent on the plan to ensure it’s rigorous enough.
- Scheduling system: Once the plan has been arrived at, it’s time to divide the jobs on the basis of type of scheduling required. This falls under time-based scheduling or event-based scheduling. The former requires synchronization with dependent programs, holidays, etc., while the latter scenario needs to ensure that there won’t be a resource crunch when the event is fired and new job started.
- Job execution: This is perhaps the most critical part of the whole process, as resources need to be balanced across the various workloads. At the same time, priority scheduling should be in operation to make sure important jobs finish first.
- Monitoring: Finally, the system should be constantly monitored and vital reports generated. Just because everything seems to be working fine doesn’t mean it is.
A planned approach reduces confusion and allows enterprises to maximize their resources when automating IT workloads.
