ISSUE 003 / OCTOBER 2026
FROM JAMS
THE QUIET HOURS
JAMS Software’s monthly newsletter.
On September 18, our support team moved its own on-call rotation off PagerDuty and onto JAMS Incident Management. It took under an hour. Three days later, Virginia DMV’s story went up: more than eighty ActiveBatch jobs moved to JAMS Scheduler in about two weeks, with a renewal deadline closing in.
November brings the Fall Customer Summit on the 17th and JAMS Scheduler 7.9.3 on the 23rd.
BS
Bobby Schmidt
VP of Marketing, JAMS Software
01 / CASE STUDY
JAMS moved its own on-call off PagerDuty in under an hour
The number one complaint from people coming off PagerDuty is that there is no easy way to convert schedules. So we built that into the product.
Kevin Casey, Director of Development, JAMS Software
Our support on-call is a rotation of four engineers. We moved it on September 18, two and a half weeks after JAMS Incident Management became available to everyone. End to end, it took under an hour.
The schedules took seconds. In our migration, the PagerDuty conversion carried over people, teams, schedules, rotations, and escalation policies. Rebuilding those by hand is usually what keeps a team on a tool it wants to leave. Zendesk took minutes. After-hours tickets now page whoever is on call and escalate to the next person if nobody answers. Each engineer accepted one invitation.
Before PagerDuty, after-hours calls went to an outside answering service that took notes and phoned the on-call manager. PagerDuty replaced the answering service. JAMS Incident Management replaced PagerDuty.
If you are shopping for an autonomous AI SRE product, JAMS Incident Management is not a good fit today. It pages the right person and keeps at it until they acknowledge. You can run the PagerDuty conversion on your own schedules with the 14-day free trial: no credit card, every feature included, escalation policies among them. After that, the Free plan is $0 for up to 5 users, with one on-call schedule and no escalation policies.
02 / CUSTOMER STORY
Virginia DMV moved eighty jobs off ActiveBatch in two weeks
According to the DMV team, their ActiveBatch renewal came back with a price increase, a two-year commitment, and under thirty days left on the old contract. They moved more than eighty production jobs to JAMS Scheduler in about two weeks. The purchase order went out fifteen days after the first conversation.
When the DMV team described what made the timeline possible, they did not name a feature. They named direct access to a JAMS engineer who answered technical questions instead of routing them onward.
JUMP, the migration tool built for JAMS Scheduler, converts competitor job definitions across nine platforms and automates roughly 75% of the conversion. JAMS Scheduler pricing is published on the site, no sales call needed.
03 / FOR JAMS CUSTOMERS
Fall Customer Summit, November 17
Tuesday, November 17, 10:00 AM Central. Virtual.
Our recurring customer summit lands six days before JAMS Scheduler 7.9.3 ships. Customers get a first look at the release with live demos of the new features, plus a few updates we are saving for the day. Registration details are going to customers by email. If you are a customer and have not received yours, contact your account manager.
04 / COMING NOVEMBER 23
JAMS Scheduler 7.9.3
The biggest release in JAMS Scheduler history. Seven headline features:
JAMS MCP and JAX: Monitor Flow, Job Dependency, and Job Creation
Desktop and Web Client: SLA Engine, REST API Execution Method, Remote File Triggers, and Universal Search
Release notes go up on November 23.
05 / ONE MORE THING
Dependency Hell at PASS Data Community Summit
Kevin Chen won the Dependency Hell trophy at SQL Saturday Boston with 3,100 points. The next shot is PASS Data Community Summit, November 9 to 11 at the Hyatt Regency Seattle, where JAMS is sponsoring.
The PASS edition has its own board and stays locked until the event. Get the password at the JAMS booth on the day, then play on any device: your phone, your laptop, your seat in the back of a session. You do not have to be at our station to get on the board. Top score takes the trophy, and everyone who stops by gets a key fidget.
The PASS edition opens at the event at dependencyhell.gg/event/passwest2026.
Worth reading
We checked eleven workload automation tools for a vendor-supported MCP server and a built-in AI agent, then looked at what an agent can change and where the model runs. It ends with five questions to answer before an agent touches a production job. Pete Hegland and Dan Fowle explain why JAX asks a person to approve any write before it makes it.
Where multi-scheduler environments break: dependencies hidden in scripts, time buffers standing in for triggers, and jobs that exit zero after catching their own error. Louis Diaz on why a green status does not always mean the job worked.
What else we’re reading
The UK and the EU fall back on October 25, and the US follows on November 1. For clock changes under three hours, cron runs a job scheduled in a skipped hour right away and does not run a job in a repeated hour twice. That only covers jobs on a fixed time or an interval longer than an hour. Anything that runs more often is scheduled normally, and other schedulers make their own choices.
access.redhat.com
ThousandEyes counts outage events across ISPs, cloud providers, collaboration apps, and edge networks every week. Week of September 21: 559 globally. The week after: 303. Week of October 5: 310.
networkworld.com
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