The Top BMC Control-M Alternative: JAMS Scheduler

0:00 Intro
Welcome to the Cutover. My name is Bobby Schmidt, head of marketing here at JAMS. If you're watching this, you don't wanna hear from me. You wanna see an actual cutover from Control-M to JAMS, so I'll keep this fast. JAMS is priced per agent starting at $833 a month, billed annually. Add jobs, bill stays the same. And JUMP, our migration tool, is free. Darrell Walker is about to show you how it works. Darrell, take it away

0:22 Darrell Walker on how migrations work
So as you just heard, we have tons of experience converting customers like yourself from their current solution into JAMS. You know, but you're probably wondering, like why you're watching this video, what does that process really look like? And the honest answer there is that every migration does tend to be just a little bit different, right? It all comes down to the source platform we're coming from, the quality and amount of data that we get from that, and just the overall complexity of that source environment. But in general, they all tend to follow, you know, this kind of five-step process here. So it really starts with an extract from your current Control-M environment. So you're gonna send us that Control-M job definition export in XML format

1:02 The five-step migration process
From either the, Export Def Job utility or the automation API. So either of those are going to work for us, but we'll analyze that extract and get you a conversion assessment typically within five business days. From there, we're gonna build the migration plan itself. So that's going to include things like timeline, your drop dead date that, you know, when you have to be cut over by, and who's gonna be responsible for each part of that process. Then we'll convert. So we can either use JUMP to perform some of that automated translation of many of your existing jobs and objects into, you know, JAMS-ready jobs and objects. Or if you have more complex environments or just want some additional help, our service team can work with you, to build out those jobs and hand you that finished product. And once we have everything built in JAMS, your team will validate. So nothing's gonna get cut over without testing and sign-off from you. And then we do cut over. So we begin cutting over jobs into JAMS, and that's while Control-M runs alongside, right? We wanna make sure we have that trust established, cut things over slowly, and once we have all jobs… until we have all the jobs cut over. So one of the biggest concerns you might have is just trying to figure out

2:12 What converts automatically
What's actually going to convert from your current Control-M environment. And the answer there is, you know, really typically most of it will convert fine. The key is that we do need kind of the most complete data set possible. All those key components of your Control-M environment, we need the extracts for. So, that's going to obviously include the job definition exports, the folders, right? The job structures themselves and the source. Also typically things like calendars, if you have rules-based calendars. So assuming we do have, you know, that most complete data set possible, Control-M is really in that converts most of the way automatically category, right? Obviously, there's gonna be some manual review, manual, potentially rebuilding or reworking of jobs. But we've seen a lot of Control-M environments, and they typically do match up fairly well with JAMS. So the majority of those items can be created in some form, automated. So those, again, are gonna include things like the job definitions, the source within them, calendars, you know, basic job dependencies, file and time-based triggers, notifications, et cetera. Even some other things like if we have the rules-based calendar specifically, we can typically line those up pretty well with the appropriate construct from JAMS, whether that maps more to a scheduled trigger or into an actual JAMS calendar. So not gonna pretend that this is going to be a magic solution, right?

3:31 What needs a person
We're not gonna be able to 100% take everything in your existing environment and just automatically convert it into JAMS. That's just not going to happen. And really no one else in our space should claim that they can do that either. There is way too many variables at play here, right? Too many different variations, iterations of how people create things in these different scheduling platforms to be able to account for all the possible variations of how users are going to create jobs, across their, their scheduling solutions. So there's gonna be things that just don't line up one-to-one, and we're gonna have to maybe create some items by hand or possibly rework some jobs to fit the way that JAMS is going to handle those same scenarios. So for Control-M specifically, some of those things could be, you know, more complex in conditions and out conditions that maybe reference things like a previous or next order date. JAMS can handle some of those job dependencies, but we don't have really a direct method to calculate those values based off of something like an order date. So other examples would be certain auto edit variables. So Control-M does have a number of built-in variables for getting information, specifically around dates, which JAMS can do some of that as well. But they have some more specific variables we would want to look at. Also around things like job data or making calculations like a plus or a minus. Again, those don't always line up or correlate exactly one-to-one to JAMS. We typically have to figure out what the best method to get that data that we need is and how to appropriately put that into the corresponding JAMS jobs. And occasionally, certain scheduling conditions, typically around things like cyclic jobs that maybe end early based off some condition, or more complex scheduling logic. Again, they just kind of require a little more hands-on touch to figure out how that is going to line up in JAMS. So again, this is gonna be that, you know, maybe 25-ish percent that your team and our team will work together to kinda figure out what the best outcome is here and how we can make this work within JAMS. So to assist with some of these migration pains, we did develop,

5:31 Meet JUMP
A tool we're calling JUMP. So it's the JAMS Universal Migration Platform. This is a free standalone tool. It doesn't necessarily require JAMS installed to utilize it if you wanna use it in a dry run capacity. But it's really built to both, analyze and give you a, a result of what could happen if you did a conversion, as well as do some of that automated migration for you. No risk for you to download or use this. Again, doesn't require a live instance of JAMS to do the dry run. Nothing would get migrated then. It's just gonna be a preview report, kind of like a, a what if scenario. So very low commitment here, low entry point. Just allows you to kind of get after the data and see, you know, what would happen. So let's actually go ahead and take a look at, what this looks like in action

6:10 Demo: extracting Control-M jobs
So this is the JUMP interface. As you can see, we can migrate from a number of different source schedulers, but here we have Control-M. And the first thing we're gonna do is provide that extract data that I mentioned. So primarily, right, the requirement being that we have the primary export file that contains the, the job information. So we can get that piece here. Optionally, we have a calendar export input here, so if you wanna export those rule-based calendars, that's gonna give us, a much better result in that we'll be able to calculate, different scheduling elements that we may not be able to get from the main export, there. And optionally, we can specify the new daytime with Control-M, so that's, essentially the time that all the jobs get ordered, typically seven o'clock AM. But you have… If you've overridden that to be some other value, you can specify that here. And again, that just helps us get a more accurate representation or creation of those scheduled triggers that will be created in JAMS. So let's extract the jobs, and we can see here we got… we have a hundred and sixty-four jobs in this export, sixty-seven warnings, no errors, and we're gonna build five connections out of this. So connection to things like a SQL box or SFTP site, for instance. And here we can see organized by folder, all the different jobs, their names, the, the type of job it's going to convert to in JAMS, the schedule information, folder again, this… the agent we're going to create this on. And then any warnings or informational messages that we need to maybe be concerned with. So info being just things that maybe you want to check and verify post-conversion, and then warnings being things that maybe you have to go and manually touch and, and potentially fix or update. So in this instance, we have, we have identified this is a, a SQL script job, but it looks like it's calling an SSIS package. So this is letting you know that, "Hey, this will probably work fine, but you may want to create this as an SSIS direct job in JAMS." Just a little bit easier to look at and understand what's happening there. Again, some information down here about some macros being unmapped, so that would be like those automated variables I was talking about for getting information about the, order day. This is looking for the day, the month, and the year, separate variables. Some other dependency information that we couldn't either, resolve based off of, the information we had or maybe there's not an equivalent. So these are the types of things you wanna go through and look at just to get an idea of where you may need to go back and touch these, these jobs. But as you can see, a lot of this does convert, you know, fairly automated. So we continue, and this is the target configuration sections where we're gonna configure the information about the target JAMS environment.

8:54 Running a dry run
But here we're just gonna go with dry runs. This box is checked by default, so we're not going to again be able to write anything just off the bat without, you know, performing, an uncheck here. So let's run this dry run just to get an idea of what that process looks like. And it is very quick. It just gives you a quick output of, how many of these jobs would convert along with any of those supporting objects like folders, agents, credentials, connections, et cetera. Some reports that we can download about what this process would look like and an HTML report as well. So, this is another way we can look at this data, again telling us how many jobs would be created and again, those supporting objects Any warnings or errors that we need to be concerned with. So this is broken down by job of the different areas that we need to potentially look at. So in this case, ninety-eight of the hundred and sixty-four jobs may have

9:37 Reading the conversion report
Some manual work or things that need verified just to make sure that they're going to come over exactly as we intend. So oftentimes, again, these aren't, you know, anything that's gonna require a lot of work. It's just more, hey, check this out, make sure that what we did is what you're expecting it to do. Again, there may be some items that we do have to re- rework completely, but we can see just looking at this list. So this source releases the job on a Boolean value. So we're just wanting to make sure that the way we built these dependencies matches up what you were expecting. Here's one again about notification information, having some variables in that we just wanna make sure came over correctly or that you may need to remap. So oftentimes it's not anything that is, you know, big deal breakers or, things that have to be completely rebuilt from scratch. Oftentimes it's things that may just need to be slightly touched or tweaked to, figure out how they may come up, or work in JAMS. So you can look through this list here and see by job again, each of those different items that need to be worked. And at the bottom it's gonna give us again a quick table that we can, search by statuses or by name to look again at, what that process would look like. So once we're happy with that, we can come back here at the beginning and we can do an actual live conversion. So again, if I choose my XML extract here, I'll just leave the default seven o'clock as my new day time. We'll extract those jobs.

11:04 Converting jobs into JAMS
I'm gonna convert everything. So we click continue, and now I'm gonna uncheck this dry run box. So now I have to put in the information for my JAM server. So we'll do that here. And I do need to get an API key We can test our connection, make sure it works okay. And then we have a couple optional fields. So the first is our target folder prefix. So this allows us to essentially create a parent folder that's going to be above all of the folders we're going to create from the source files. So if there's, you know, five different folders that the jobs in our controlled environment live in, maybe we want to nest those underneath something like a department or a particular server. Again, we can manually ch- pick and choose which of the jobs that we want from the, from the source. We don't have to convert everything. So if we want to convert these over, you know, a, a folder at a time or, you know, however we want to group these things, we can prefix this, those folders with a, with a parent. So I'm just gonna go ahead and prefix this with the name of the company in this instance, just so we can separate these out. And then optionally, we can choose to override both the agent and the credential that's used to run these jobs for both Windows and Linux platforms. So, you know, oftentimes when we perform migrations, maybe those destination systems that we're gonna move our JAMS jobs into aren't the same servers or credentials that we were using previously in our source platform. So this allows us to do a, essentially a direct one-to-one mapping of w-Windows agents and credentials to those s-specific job types. It'll take any PowerShell, any command, any SQL, any other job type that runs on Windows, and it will replace the agent that's in that source with what agent we define here, and the same with a specific credential. And then again, the same thing on our Linux platforms here And the last checkbox, typically we're gonna leave this checked by default, right? We want to make sure any trigger that we create on those new jobs we build in JAMS is disabled, right? We don't want those jobs firing as soon as they're created or when those times come up. We don't want jobs running without us knowing or intending them to run. So we'll build the triggers, but we'll make sure those triggers are disabled so we can enable them one at a time and make sure, we're going through the appropriate testing procedures. And that's it. So now we click Import, and it's gonna go through and import those jobs for us. You can see we can stop this if we realize we made a mistake. We also do have some help information up here. So you can click the Help button. It's gonna tell you, you know, what this product or, you know, application does, how it works. It's gonna tell you how to go and get an API key if you need to, to create one within the web client. Some information like that. And then we also have some source-specific information. So for Control-M, it'll tell us, you know, how to get an extract. It's gonna tell us all the information we're looking for, right, like our, our job exports, the calendar exports, a basic list of things that will convert great, and then maybe a list of things that don't convert or may require some specific, some specific help with, right? And some gotchas, things to be aware of for each of these as well. So try to give you as much data as possible so you can make a good informed decision about, you know, what to do with these jobs. Now, as you can see, we got a result here. So again, we did a hundred and sixty-four jobs. We created some folders, some agents, credentials. We had some items that needed some attention here, some that already existed and were skipped. So again, we get all of that information. We can download our reports, same types of things that we looked at previously. So this is gonna give us that same report, that we were looking at before. And now we can actually log into JAMS and take a look at what these converted jobs look like. So we come over here to Jobs, we click our Northwind folder, and we see all those subfolders underneath, and we can see all of the jobs that we were looking at. So a SQL command job, for instance, right? We can take a look at the source here. So everything we were expecting, to pull out here for that SQL script. We can look at any schedules. So this one has a data schedule at two AM, and you can see it's currently disabled, so that came over fine. No dependencies, no job statuses. A couple of notification events here. If we had any, we see our properties for the agents and our execute as credential were created, information about our SQL connection and database. And if we had any parameters, those would be built as well. So, basically, right, we can go scoll… come in here and double-check that everything does indeed look, you know, exactly like we were anticipating it to. So here we have a parameter. Make sure we have our load date param, which we do. And again, looking at all of our schedule, dependency, and event type information All right. So we think this is a great tool, right?

16:02 When to bring our team in
Obviously, it's here to help you, with your analysis and even potentially with migration. But it's definitely not a one-size-fits-all solution, right? We recognize every customer is different. They'll have different skill levels, different timelines, just different needs overall. So we're here to be your partner throughout this entire process, right? We do offer professional services. They can assist you really anywhere that you need to within the migration process. If you want them to help, all of our migration services are fixed bids, so the number that you approve is what you pay. We're not gonna pay you for overage hours or scope creep, things like that. Even migrations and found migrations tend to be free. So ask us, you know, if yours may qualify for that. And also training is gonna be included in that. We're not gonna, you know, leave you high and dry. We're not gonna put all your jobs in JAMS and, and just hand you the keys and let you go. We wanna make sure that you're successful in JAMS. We wanna make sure you understand how it works, you know, how to create jobs, how to troubleshoot things, and also how to contact and who to contact, if you do need some additional assistance So there's really two ways to get started. You can go and download JUMP today directly from the website. You can put your Control-M extract directly in it. You know, no connection required, nothing migrated. It's gonna give you that basic analysis of, you know, what would happen if you were to move into JAMS. If you want to go ahead and, and talk to us or learn more about JAMS overall, definitely feel free to schedule a demo with us. You know, we can walk you through the product, we can talk about your specific use cases, give you some initial pricing, and just help you better understand, you know, what this migration process looks like specifically tailored around your needs and your jobs. So looking forward to talking to you guys. Thanks.

17:43 Next steps
That's a cutover. But each environment is different, so here's the next step. Download JUMP and run it yourself or book time with our team. Bring your job count and your renewal date. Links are on the screen. Thanks for watching