BMC Control-M 7: A Journey from Traditional Batch Scheduling to Workload Automation

BMC Control-M is the most widely used workload automation tool in the world. The problem is up until now if you wanted to find out how to use it your options were pretty limited. Either go to training (good luck getting that approved), try to learn it on your own (good luck with that one, too), or find the two existing forums out there that cover the product (hint: Control-X on Yahoo Groups and the BMC Communities forums). For such a powerful product, the lack of documentation outside what BMC provided was pretty much non-existant.Qing has written a book that takes you through the product from setup, to scheduling, to post-run analysis. You'll not only learn about the Control-M worload scheduling system, but you will also learn about just what exactl is "workload automation" (hint: it's not just batch anymore) and how can you use this tool to help prioritize, plan and implement workload rules across your IT processes no matter if they are batch, real-time or a hybrid of the both.I highly recommend this book to anyone who is a newbie to the world of Control-M. It will give you a good starting point reference guide, as well as give you background of why the tool does what it does -- and what makes it all work behind the scenes.

So far so good. A great book for people who are new to the product. Also a good reference book as well if you have been working with the product for some time. Hope to see the author again at BMC Engage 2015 in Las Vegas.

Great book!

Best book available for explaining Control-M for beginners to experts there is plenty to learn here.

This Book is very Good for below topics1. Control M Components?CONTROL-M/Enterprise Manager (CONTROL-M/EM)CONTROL-M/ServersCONTROL-M/Agents and Remote hostsControl Modules2. Architecture of Control-MControl-M is a 3 tier architecture. Here you have to explain about the components of Control-M (EM, Server and Agents)3 DatacenterControl-M datacenter is comprised of Control-M/Server, Database, and Control-M/Agents.If you see the diagram here, you can observe 2 datacenters in that picture.Normally we will be having different datacenters for Test, Dev, Prod.. etc. in some organizations for few critical applications they may maintain a different datacenter.Datacenter design is completely depend upon the organizations design plan for scheduling solution.4 .Control-M AccessoriesControl-M/Enterprise Manager GUI (EM/GUI or ECS GUI), Gateways, Global Alert Server (GAS), Global Condition Server (GCS) and Control-M GUI Server.It is important to understand what each of these components does and its place in the Control-M architecture.5 . GASExpansion of GAS is Global Alert Server. This is one of the components of Control-M EM Server.This will be used to store all the alerts generated from datacenters under the Control-M EM.6. GCS?Expansion of GCS is Global Condition Server. This is also one of the components of Control-M EM Server.This will be used to store all the conditions generated from datacenters under the Control-M EM.7. New Day Process(NDPAt a set time each day (defined during installation as the start of day at the site), CONTROL-M performs New Day processing, during which:CONTROL-M performs a number of maintenance and cleanup functions that the operator would otherwise have to perform manually.Job scheduling definitions are selected from the scheduling tables (based on their basic scheduling criteria) and are placed in the Active Jobs file. These jobs can then be submitted and tracked by the CONTROL-M monitor.During New Day processing, jobs that have ended OK or whose retention period has expired according to job scheduling definition parameters are deleted from the Active Jobs file.In simple terms "this loads all of the jobs that Control-M knows should run that day. Control-M does not necessarily know all of the jobs to run. it only knows the ones scheduled to run that day. In process of cleanup Control-M will clear all the jobs except the jobs which are in Hold and Jobs which are having MAXWAIT".Note: The jobs which were ended NOTOK will be retained for one day.8. ViewpointCriteria that determine which jobs in the Active Jobs file are loaded into the database (collection), which jobs are displayed (filter), and how they are displayed (hierarchy) in the CONTROL-M/EM window.9 Archived ViewpointThis is the place Where you can see historical data. In this you can see 'N' no.of days viewpoints which were completed. The 'N' days will be set in Control-M Server settings.10 How will you Order or Load the jobs?Option 1: Use Tools -> Order / Force Option.Option 2: Using Control-M Desktops Scheduling Table Manager.Option 3: In Desktop, Open job properties and use Order.11. Difference between Order and ForceOrder will check with the job scheduling criteria and brings into AJF only If the scheduling criteria met.Force will ignore the scheduling criteria and bring the job(s) to AJF12. Control-M Documentation?It is the escalation procedure to use in case of any event occur. Event may be Job Failure, Long Running, Not started by a particular time or Not completed by a specified time.13. What is "Owner" field denotes in Control-M job properties?This is the actual ID which will be used to execute the job in the given node-id.Simple terms, The Owner should have permissions to execute the job at the target machine.14. Filewatcher?It is an utility provided by BMC to watch for a File Event to occur. It might be a File Create, Update or Delete.For Eg: If I want to start a job based on a File Created at a particular location, I'll setup a Filewatcher job to look for that particular file and this FileWatcher job will finished OK when It finds the file. Once this job finished I'll run the NEXT job.There will be different parameters which we will be using to setup a FileWatcher job.

I remember batch processing well from my days on the Dec-10 and the Vaxes. Under that operating system [VMS], you had rudimentary batch controls; essentially equivalent to what cron gives you on Unix machines. This book discusses a totally geek named Control-M that ran originally on mainframes. But if you have ever run batch jobs on other machines, many of the concepts in the text are familiar.BMC has taken the control of batch processing very far. The book goes into intricate details about much that is possible under Control-M. One sign of the times is that it can be installed with an accompanying Oracle or Sybase database, or it can use a default one supplied by BMC.Many subprocesses or servers are defined, that interact with each other. These were factored out as separate but related entities to simplify the coding. Much of the approach is very heavyweight, probably by necessity of the large computational jobs to be run under it. For example, one server [the naming service] is an open source C++ instantiation of CORBA. The latter is renowed (or notorious) for producing overall systems that are tightly bound, unlike the loosely coupled approach of Service Oriented Architecture.The breakdown of the servers should seem logical to you. Starting with the supervisor, called SU [="superuser"]. This is used to manage the lesser processes. And to avoid or reduce the risk that an inexperienced user submitting or controlling one of the latter can trash the entire system. Again, this broadly follows the general approach of multiuser systems that define the roles of generic users and a superuser [root].Unlike the batch controls of VMS, Control-M has a graphical user interface. Comprehensive and a little daunting by being so. There are indeed many options you can pick, and understanding the meaning of these is a non-trivial learning curve.Logically, there is a command line interface where you can enter typically long commands [they have many options] to submit to Control-M. Over time if you get experienced, you might actually prefer the CLI because this allows a simple automated scheduling, whereas the GUI often implies manually bringing up a window in which to pick choices.