Scheduler Jobs

Job Schedulers are one of the major components of the IT infrastructure since the early mainframe systems. At first, stacks of punch cards were processed one after the other, hence the term batch processing originated. A scheduler automates the function of processing all the events performed each day.

Earlier Job schedulers were used on IBM mainframes however modern schedulers are available for different architectures and operating systems. The need for mainframe job schedulers has also grown with the increased adoption of distributed computer environments.

A job scheduler is a program that enables an enterprise to schedule and, in some cases, continuously monitors computer batch jobs and gives completion notification. A batch job can be units of work, such as the running of a payroll program etc.

A job scheduler can initiate and manage jobs automatically by processing prepared job control language statements or through equivalent interaction with a human operator. Today"s job schedulers typically provide a graphical user interface and a single point of control for all the work in a distributed network of computers.

A job scheduler considers various parameters to decide which jobs to run and in which order. It checks the job priority, computer resources, execution time allocated to the user, estimated and elapsed execution time, availability of peripheral devices and occurrence of prescribed events and many more before running a particular job.

With a scheduler you can run jobs of various other platforms and software such as SAP jobs, Siebel, any Database jobs, Unix, windows etc. Modern scheduling tools greatly outperform the manual scheduling methods commonly used decades ago and they support variety of operating systems and software which can be easily integrated with the Job scheduler.