Joined: 26 Apr 2004 Posts: 4652 Location: Raleigh, NC, USA
Guys, for anyone who's used and supported the CA-7 scheduler for a long time, I've got a question for you. We recently switched from CA-Scheduler so there's no one on the staff here with a lot of CA-7 experience.
Our IT Best-Practices policy mandates that we create incident tickets in the problem management system for any event that requires a call-out to a support group. Since I'm in the Automation team, it's our responsibility to make sure that we trap the CA-7 "CA-7.SMF3 JOB XXXXXX (nnnn/nnnnnnn/XXXXXXXX) ON YYYY FAILED..." message from the console and generate an incident ticket from that event, and the IEF450I message for abends or JCL errors.
In the past two weeks, we had a job failure that failed to produce an incident ticket, and an incident ticket that was produced without a corresponding job failure. One was an SB37 abend. There was a CA-7.SMF3 ... message produced, but JES never posted a corresponding IEF450I message on the console. A few days ago there was a JCL failure incident created from a CA-7.SMF3 ... message, but again no other correponding IEF45xI message was posted from JES.
Turns out the first job that CA-7 reported as an abend didn't post the IEF450I message to JES because i didn't run in JES. Instead, it ran on another server via an agent. The JCL failure that CA-7 reported still hasn't been explained.
The shops I've worked in before here required jobs to abend if step return-code conditions were not met, which would in turn create an incident ticket and force a call-out to the support group. Now I think I see why they made that requirement.
Have any of you experienced these issues? If so, how do you accurately generate incident tickets? I'm thinking about proposing a change in the way we generate incidents, by NOT using the CA-7.SMF3 ... messages as our automation source, but rather by sticking with the automation for the IEF45xI messages only.
Joined: 26 Apr 2004 Posts: 4652 Location: Raleigh, NC, USA
It can, but our internal policies won't allow it to. All of the alert messages have to be forwarded and consolidated to OmniBus which will open the incidents via SOAP.
