Job Scheduling

Job scheduling is performed using job schedulers. Job schedulers are programs that enable scheduling and, at times, track computer "batch" jobs, or units of work like the operation of a payroll program. Job schedulers have the ability to start and control jobs automatically by running prepared job-control-language statements or by means of similar communication with a human operator. Generally, the present-day job schedulers include a graphical user interface (GUI) along with a single point of control.

Organizations wishing to automate unrelated IT workload could also use more sophisticated attributes from a job scheduler, for example:

• Real-time scheduling in accordance with external, unforeseen events
• Automated restart and recovery in case of failures
• Notifying the operations personnel
• Generating reports of incidents
• Audit trails meant for regulation compliance purposes

In-house developers can write these advanced capabilities; however, these are usually offered by providers who are experts in systems-management software.

In scheduling, many different schemes are used to determine which specific job to run. Some parameters that may be considered are as follows:

• Job priority
• Availability of computing resource
• License key if the job is utilizing a licensed software
• Execution time assigned to the user
• Number of parallel jobs permitted for a user
• Projected execution time
• Elapsed execution time
• Presence of peripheral devices
• Number of cases of prescribed events