Control-M is one of the world's most wildely used enterprise class batch workload automation product produced by BMC Software. With a strong knowledge of Control-M, you will be able to use the tool to meet ever growing batch processing needs. However, there is no book that can guide you to implement and manage this powerful tool successfully until now. With this book, you will quickly master Control-M, and be able to call yourself "a Control-M" specialist!
This book will lead you into the world of Control-M, and guide you to implement and maintain a Control-M environment successfully. By mastering this workload automation tool, you will see new opportunities opening up before you.
With this book, you will be able to take away and put into practice knowledge from every aspect of Control-M implementation, administration, design, and management of Control-M job flows, and more importantly how to move into workload automation, and let batch processing utilize the cloud.
You will start off with the history and concept of batch processing and how recenty it got evolved into workload automation, and then get an understanding of how Control-M fits into the big picture. Then we will look more in depth at the technical details of the tool - How to plan, install, use, as well as manage a Control-M environment, and finally look at how to leavage the tool to meet the already sophiscated and ever growing business demand. Throughout the book, you will learn important concepts and features of Control-M through detailed explainations and examples, as well as learn from the author's experience, accumulated over many years. By the end of the book, you will be set up to work efficiently with this tool, and also understand how to utilize the latest features of Control-M.
Chapter 1, Get To Know the Concept, gives a good understanding of the concept of batch processing and centralized enterprise scheduling what were the challenges and why they exist today. Besides that, it also provides an overall view of the latest concept workload automation.
Chapter 2, Exploring Control-M, gives an overview of the features of Control-M, important concepts, and reviews the architecture of Control-M.
Chapter 3, Building the Control-M Infrastructure, introduces the concept of the "Three Ages" to archive workload automation, and then looks at the different requirements and challenges at each stage. It also talks about the sizing and the technical considerations that are necessary for building a solid batch infrastructure. Finally, it shows how to get started into the technical details and prepare machines and the environment for the Control-M implementation.
Chapter 4, Creating and Managing Batch Flows with Control-M GUI, looks at the important job scheduling concepts of Control-M in depth and applies them by defning some simple jobs in Control-M Desktop, and manages them using the Control-M/EM GUI client. Then it goes one step further by defning a complete batch fow to meet a scheduling requirement.
Chapter 5, Administrating the Control-M Infrastructure, starts with installing the additional Control-M components BIM and Forecast, followed by discussing the tasks involved in expanding and updating the Control-M environment. It talks about the different methods of performing regular installation tasks, such as applying fix packs and installing Control-M/EM GUI clients, as well as demonstrates how to define Agentless remote hosts in both Linux and Windows environments. Towards the end, it explains how to perform some must-known administration tasks, including stop/start Control-M components, define Control-M/EM user authorizations, and customize the GUI.
Chapter 6, Advanced Batch Scheduling and Management, shows to add more jobs to Control-M by bulk load jobs from the crontab. It explains how to transform file processing job flow from time-based scheduling into event-driven scheduling, and improve some part of the job flow by using additional Control Modules. After defining the jobs, it revisits the Control-M/EM GUI client to discover more GUI features, such as advanced functionalities offered in ViewPoints and archived ViewPoints. It also gives an overview of how to use BIM and Forecast to proactively monitor jobs and estimate potential impacts, by creating What-if scenarios. Towards the end, it visits the Reporting Facility, takes a look at each available report type, and discusses how to automate reporting.
Chapter 7, Beyond Everyday Administration, focuses on the administration side of Control-M but in more depth. It starts with looking at the command-line utilities that can be used to affect the active environment. More importantly, it reviews the different security options provided by Control-M, as well as a demonstrates the Control-M mirroring and failover. After having secured the environment, it took us to the new level by perfecting the Control-M environment.
Chapter 8, Road to Workload Automation, makes a number of improvements to the file processing job flow from both the integration and performance aspects, by using the cutting-edge Control-M add-on features. These include enabling the job fow to have exposure to external applications, by using the BPI web service interface, integration with ESB with BPI web service and message queue jobs, rendering the processing truly parallel, and implementing load balancing. Towards the end, it turns our processing flow into workloads, and taps into the power of cloud computing to for limitless processing.
This book is suitable for professionals who are beginning to use Control-M, but who also have some general IT experience, such as knowing the concepts of computer system architecture, operating systems, databases, basic computer networking. Some entry level skills in scripting languages will be of help along the way.
Also for those who are from the mainframe environment or moving from other schedulers to Control-M, you can use this book as a starting point.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "By 12:00am, there are ten orders generated in total. Program PROCESS_ORDER is set to trigger at this time of the day to process them".
A block of code is set as follows:
<soapenv:Envelope xmlns:soapenv="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/ envelope/" xmlns:sch="http://www.bmc.com/ctmem/schema630"> <soapenv:Header/> <soapenv:Body> <sch:request_order_force> <sch:user_token>?</sch:user_token> <sch:force_it>yes</sch:force_it> <sch:control_m>CTM_LINUX</sch:control_m> <sch:table_name>TEST</sch:table_name> <sch:odate>ODAT</sch:odate> </sch:request_order_force> </soapenv:Body> </soapenv:Envelope>
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
# pwd
/usr/java/jboss-6.0.0.Final/bin
# ./run.sh -Djboss.as.deployment.ondemand=false -b 0.0.0.0
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: " One to one relationship simply means the jobs run one after another, for example, when Job A is completed, then Job B starts.".
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