Creating a task to Monitor Jobs

About this task

Create a Monitor Jobs task to retrieve all the jobs that satisfy a number of filter criteria. For example, you might want to retrieve all the jobs with a specific status, a specific priority, and by actual start or end time.

From the list of jobs satisfying your filter criteria that are displayed, you can also retrieve a list of predecessors that are causing a delay of a selected job. Jobs in the predecessors list are in such states such as error, late, fence (for distributed systems only), suppressed (for distributed systems only) or long duration. If these jobs do not complete successfully on time, they prevent the selected job from completing on time. In this view, you can quickly see on which jobs you need to take appropriate recovery actions (for example, by releasing dependencies or answering prompts).

To create a Monitor Jobs task, perform the following steps.
Note: For all the details about options and fields displayed in the panels, see the online help by clicking the question mark located at the top-right corner of each panel.

Procedure

  1. In the navigation bar, click System Status and Health > Workload Monitoring > Monitor Workload and follow the steps described in Creating a monitoring task query.

    If you are familiar with conman, in the Query text box specify a query based on the conman showjobs syntax. Alternatively, click Edit to select the filter criteria from the list of options that is displayed.

  2. In the General Filter section, specify some broad filtering criteria to limit the results retrieved by your query. Here you start refining the scope of your query by also considering the amount of information you want to retrieve. Optionally, in some of the results tables in the Periodic Refresh Options section, you can customize how often to refresh the information by specifying the refresh interval in seconds in hh:mm:ss format, with a minimum of 30 seconds and a maximum of 7200 seconds. For example, 00:01:10 means 70 seconds. If the value specified is not valid, the last valid value is automatically used. If the periodic refresh is enabled for a task, when the task runs, the refresh time control options are shown in the results table. You can also set or change the periodic refresh interval directly in the results table when the timer is in stop status. In this case, the value specified at task creation time is temporarily overwritten. You can search for jobs based on their status, on the workstation where they run, or the job streams to which they belong. For example, you can look for all the jobs that did not complete successfully on the specified workstations, or you can look for all the jobs with the same owner and that have a specific priority level and an immediate restart option set.
  3. In the Time Data Filter section, specify a time range to limit your search to jobs or job streams that ran within a specific time period.
    Note: If no date and time is specified then the jobs and job streams are not filtered based on their processing time.
  4. In the Dependencies Filter section, you can filter your results based on the dependencies they have. Only jobs that have the dependencies you specify in this panel are included in the query results. Dependencies can be jobs, job streams, resources, files, or prompts.
  5. In the Columns Definition section, select the information you want to display in the table containing the query results. According to the columns you choose here, the corresponding information is displayed in the task results table. For example, for all the objects resulting from your query, you might want to see their statuses, the workstations where the ran, when they ran, and when they were scheduled to run. You can then drill down into this information displayed in the table and navigate it. In the Columns Definition section, not only can you select the columns for this task results, but you can also specify the columns for secondary queries on job streams, jobs on critical network, and workstations. Starting from the Monitor Jobs task table of results, you can start further queries on the secondary objects associated to one of the jobs in the table; the information to be retrieved with these secondary queries is specified in this panel.

Results

After specifying all the required criteria, you can save your task or immediately run it to create a list of jobs that satisfies your filtering settings. For details, see Creating a monitoring task query.