What is Batch Processing?

Batch processing is the running of the repetitive computing tasks that every business relies on. These tasks cover a host of jobs that touch your most critical systems, applications, and other business software. Because of their importance for keeping your business up and running, organizations need to ensure that their batch processes execute successfully, as job failure can be both disruptive and costly.

Batch Processing: The Early Days

The earliest batch processing systems were developed in the days of mainframes and punch cards. Programs were entered on the punch cards, and system operators would have a stack, or batch, of the cards, to feed into the computer. Modern batch processing software is quite a bit more sophisticated, but still involves managing the execution of multiple processes.

What is a Batch Job?

A batch job is one of many processes that are executed using scripts and run in the background on servers or mainframe type systems. Batch jobs can be scripts, tasks, loads, file transfers, and even multi-step workloads. They are the critical tasks that keep your business flowing-from backups, ETL, payroll processes, collecting sales data and more.

What is a Batch Processing System?

A batch processing system—like an enterprise job scheduling solution—orchestrates, monitors, and logs every action to ensure you have control of the jobs running throughout your business. Jobs can be run throughout so many of your business systems and applications that make them a headache to keep track of.

Batch processing tools help you centralize your job schedule, triggers, and other dependencies to execute your batch processes consistently and reliably. By bringing together your various platforms, it’s easier to monitor batch processes and respond to any issues that come up to keep things flowing and avoid job failures.

Do You Need Batch Processing Software?

Look for the gaps and delays in your job flows. This is where good job scheduling software can streamline your business processes. Some examples include:

• Manual processes: How do you ensure that they will get submitted on time or in the correct order?
• Waiting for a previous process to complete: How do you know when it will complete?
• Waiting for files to change or new files to arrive: How often is your script looping? Are you manually checking for new files?
• Jobs set up with retries: How much overhead is that putting on the server?
• Dependencies across servers: Do you know if the server is available?

Embrace Modern Batch Processing Systems

These days batch schedulers have a few features that are essential to the modern enterprise. To save time and resources, make sure your batch processing application supports dependencies, monitors, and notifications.

Dependencies: What triggers the next step in your job flow? It could be a file arriving from a client or an online transaction. As soon as that file is created, the next step needs to run without delay.

The completion of another process or job on a local or remote server is a common prerequisite for jobs. Some run sequentially and some branch according to the requirements of the process.

Services or processes starting or ending may trigger some type of error recovery process or the next step.

Because each business division will look for the best solution for its needs, you may have different applications running on many different operating systems or hardware. Your workload automation tool needs to be compatible with all of those different operating systems and make sure dependencies across those different platforms are supported.

Monitors: Monitors look for the events that occur on your servers and trigger the next step in the process. Monitors might detect new files that are created by another process or pulled from an FTP site. Once these files are created, the next step should be triggered immediately.

Besides monitoring for prerequisites, your batch scheduler needs monitors for delays and errors. If a process runs late because it’s waiting for a file or another resource, and it goes unnoticed, you could miss an SLA. SLAs are critical to the customer service you provide to your clients. If you miss an SLA, you may end up missing the client as well.

Your workload automation tool must include the following types of monitoring capabilities:

• Files and directories
• Processes
• Underruns, overruns, and late starts
• Errors
• System availability
• Notification

Notifications: If a problem does arise or a job stream is delayed, your workload automation tool must have notification and alerting options so a small problem doesn’t evolve into a large one.

In addition to notification options for job overruns, underruns, and late starts, your batch scheduling system should include notification for the following events:

• File events: Do your sales reps want to know about a new order?
• Job failure: You should also receive job logs for troubleshooting.
• Server down: System Admins need to know before users.
• Process or service down: Your WLA tool should try to restart as well as notify you of the problem.

Management by Exception is Critical to Survival

All of the above options—supporting dependencies, monitoring systems, events, and job streams and notifying the correct staff of these problems—allow you to manage your systems by exceptions.

You must have confidence in your workload automation tool that it will run jobs when they are ready, and notify the correct people if there are problems. You shouldn’t have to log in to your system to make sure things are running smoothly. Enjoy your weekends and nights instead.

Batch Job Scheduling in AWS

Organizations leveraging cloud computing—like Amazon Web Services—face another layer of complexity to their job schedule. But centralizing your batch jobs, whether on-prem or in the cloud, doesn’t have to be difficult with batch job scheduling for AWS. With the right job scheduling tool, your IT Operations team can eliminate the stress of workloads that feature jobs in both AWS and your on-premises systems in give you a single location to deploy and monitor all your critical processes.

JAMS Batch Processing Software

With batch processing and workload orchestration from JAMS, give your team complete control of the batch jobs that keep your business running. JAMS gives users centralized cross-platform scheduling capabilities, triggers, and dependencies that run your batch processes with precision no matter how complex. Plus, batch processing from JAMS gives you the tools to monitor your batch processes in one spot and set up alerts to help you respond to any issues that prevent your batch jobs and processes from executing.

GET STARTED WITH A BATCH PROCESSING SYSTEM