This is a list of notable job scheduler software. Job scheduling applications are designed to carry out repetitive tasks as defined in a schedule based upon calendar and event conditions. This category of software is also called workload automation. Only products with their own article are listed. The list is divided into four categories: standalone vendor software supporting enterprise resource planning software, standalone vendor software without ERP support, non-vendor schedulers, and OS platform built-ins. The products are ordered alphabetically.
The information in this table is regarding this product version.
Company size
Large : the company has many products
Dedicated : the company's job scheduling product is their primary product
Script storage
Some products are only capable of starting a script or executable which is already present on the target system. Eventually some environment variables are set prior to the script run.
Some products are able to store scripts in their repository. When the job runs, its script is first transferred to the target system and then executed. This gives the batch job designer a central point of development.
Event driven
Most modern job schedulers are event driven: jobs that run in sequence have no wait time.
The opposite is time driven, like Windows' Scheduled tasks or Unix' crontab: a job runs at some time, and the next job is scheduled the expected runtime later plus some spare time.
Agents
An agentless job scheduler makes use of RSH, or more secure, of SSH.
An agent is a piece of software that is installed on every host, and is usually continuously connected to the central job scheduler. This causes more functionality to the agents, like a file trigger.
A drawback of agents is that they must be upgraded from time to time, which can cause downtime during upgrades.
Platforms
All kinds of Unix flavours mentioned by the vendors are notes as "Unix". The same goes for "Linux" and "Windows" and Mac.
Any OS account
Can the agent run a job as any OS-account on the target system? The agent of some products can only run a job as the user the agent runs as, which most likely must have a lot of privileges, which in turn might be a security issue.
stdout/err transfer
Can you inspect the standard output and/or standard error of the executed job on your viewer? Some systems even immediately transfer both to the central scheduler, which might give extra network load.
File events
Can the job scheduler react on the appearance of a file? With this you don't have to poll for the file.
File transfer
Some vendors deliver a file transfer utility. The standard command-line FTP on e.g. Unix is not good enough for batch usage: a file might be failed to transfer, yet the 'bye' command went well so the exit status will be ok. The file that may link both the servers will give a proper scheduler procedure in the process.
The SAP XBP interface comes in 2 versions: 2 and 3. Version 2 has an intercept table, while version 3 has for intercept an include and an exclude table. This is important when you want all SAP-jobs but a few being intercepted and routed through your scheduling system. Some SAP-jobs won't work well when intercepted.
Role-based security
Is it possible to grant privileges through roles to the users of your scheduling system? Think of developers, operators and administrators. Some products use LDAP or the Windows system AD.
Auditing
Some companies demand recording of all user actions, but if not it is still handy to backtrace who did some action, just to ask him why he did so.
Design lifecycle
Does the job scheduling system support the transfer of batch designs along development, test, approve and production repositories? Most products have an export- and import-feature, and some products have the transfer mechanism all built-in.
