Key features differentiating CA WA DE from other solutions
Schedule Definition from a single point – We believe CA’s Workload Automation is unique in that scheduling and development staff can define within a single Application definition an entire business process, end-to-end, regardless of run frequency, job dependencies, or operating platform; providing a single management perspective. In addition to the clarity and understanding this generates across the business and IT divisions, it is a major efficiency factor in the creation and ongoing maintenance of schedule definitions, and is further enhanced by the ability to use the single definition for multiple (hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, on demand, etc.) invocations of an application. The use of variables within each Applications job definitions can further reduces the number of job definitions that need to be created and maintained.
Dependency Inheritance – CA Workload Automation’s ability to allow the dependency from one job to another to be inherited by a successor when an intervening job is not scheduled to run is one of the unique capabilities that enables a single definition for all iterations of a schedule to be created. This means there will no longer be the need to define separate definitions for daily, weekly, monthly and/or end-of-quarter runs for a particular schedule – this can save countless person-hours in the creation and maintenance of schedule definitions, and reduces errors in keeping changes synchronised.
No Schedule Load – The concept of the ‘daily schedule load’ or a ‘New Day process’ does not exist within CA Workload Automation. In fact individual schedules can run or be held across multiple days without any special effort or consideration, and multiple iterations of an application can run many times within the same day without requiring multiple schedule definitions. With more of an organisation’s workload being real-time, it is important that work can be initiated whenever it is required to be run. CA Workload Automation automatically schedules each Application individually, according to the actual business needs, not an enforced daily schedule; and multiple iterations of an application can be either be run in parallel or queued to run one after the other, simply by ticking an option box.
Integration for End-to-End Automation – CA’s Workload Automation Agent technology enables the management of processes across hundreds or even thousands of individual disparate servers within an organisation’s IT infrastructure, from a single point, without introducing overhead or reducing performance. CA Workload Automation Agents are lean, non-invasive and powerful event-driven applications that act as conduits to extend and optimise business process automation. No additional tools, products, or servers are required to provide users of the solution with an enterprise view of their workload. The agent technology has a rich set of built-in workload automation monitoring capabilities that provide additional information to enhance the decision making capabilities on where best to place and when to run business processes.
Simple Calendar Management – CA Workload Automation’s inherent understanding of common scheduling terms provides a flexible English-like language for scheduling workload. A calendar is simply a “dictionary” of scheduling terms used as a repository for Holiday and Special Day definitions resulting in a minimum number of calendars being required. Users can define their organisation-specific scheduling criteria to a calendar to cater for holidays or special processing days like “payday”, “billing_day”, “statement_day”, or “end_of_quarter”. Calendar entries can be defined many years in advance.
Real-time Simulations – With CA Workload Automation users are able to simulate job flows prior to production implementation to assure an error-free schedule definition. Users will be able to simulate any schedule, in the past or future, at any time. In addition, symbolic variables are resolved in the simulation allowing users to see the parameter variations with different simulations. This not only provides the organisation’s operations personnel with the comfort of knowing how the schedules will run, but will give the application development staff the comfort in knowing that the schedules are defined correctly. This is a great asset in the application development life-cycle to aid in quality assurance by allowing users to validate their expected results. Simulation can prevent production errors and is a vital capability to ensuring a successful conversion from another scheduling solution.
Service level management across all services – CA’s solution provides exceptionally strong service level management capabilities. Our technology allows the business to establish SLAs with either explicit or implicit times of completion for the work requested and facilitates meeting or exceeding the service levels established by the various business units for the workloads being managed.
Graphical User Interface for Workload Management – CA Workload Automation Desktop Client software provides a powerful graphical user interface for centrally defining, monitoring and controlling the organisation’s entire enterprise workload. It is a significant productivity tool both for those defining and scheduling applications, and for those who monitor and control them. It’s an easy intuitive graphical interface enabling even the newest users to quickly drag-and-drop their way through workload definitions, calendar management, and to the monitoring and control of the enterprise workload.
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The Desktop Client promotes more efficient use of IT resources by enabling the organisation’s staff to clearly and simply communicate their application’s scheduling requirements. A flow-charting tool enables application developers to detail workflow components, platforms, and dependencies. To complete this definition of an ''Application,'' all that is then needed is some additional information about each workflow component; what needs to execute (the program/command), where it needs to run (which server or group of servers), and when it should run – no specific platform skills are required by staff to schedule this work.
This clear presentation of technical information greatly reduces errors and misunderstandings associated with application scheduling during hand-over from application development to operations.