Forewords: is Automation the ultimate answer?

IT automation is nowadays pervading the market, especially in conjunction with virtualization. Hence, one may be tempted to consider those two initiatives as the magical solution to reduce IT costs.

​They may indeed, but let’s start with confirming and arguing few simple statements:

You can use the agent for z/OS  - aka D-Driven - to schedule work using IBM Workload Scheduler. You install and configure the agent for z/OS in the z/OS system and this work as any other dynamic agent. ​As soon as it is configured, the agent automatically links with the dynamic domain manager component of IBM Workload Scheduler through the HTTP or HTTPS protocols. With the agent for z/OS you can define jobs and schedules on IBM Workload Scheduler and submit a subset of the jobs to a z/OS system and you run the planning tasks on IBM Workload Scheduler while the execution is demanded to the z/OS system. 

Securing communications in the Workload Automation environment is an essential step to meet your company’s security requirements. Does Workload Automation use a secure communication mechanism? The answer is yes! All communication is implemented over SSL protocol TLSv1.2. Read this blog to find out how to implement security correctly in a v9.5 environment by customizing default certificates.

“Mainframe essentially keeps the world running."
It may sound bold but it’s true. The quote above, which is from an IBM executive , Philip MacLochlainn, is indeed supported by stunning figures: “85% of all credit cards, 29 billion ATM transactions per year, 92 of the top 100 banks ... 12 billion passenger flights are booked” thanks to mainframe. And it makes no wonder to whom is familiar with mainframe’s history and the story of workload scheduling and management, which we contributed to write.

LET’S INTRODUCE what’s new
Get familiar with the new concepts introduced by Workload Automation on Cloud that leverage the 9.5 Fix Pack 1 on-premise version, released in July:

• Subscription folder: to increase business agility and enforce the security of your subscription, Workload Automation on Cloud introduces workflow folders for job streams and jobs.

IBM Z Workload Scheduler collects many information about its workload execution and data base definitions in different formats. You can obtain info from messages issued on SYSTEM and/or on IzWS product LOG, or you can obtain it from AUDIT function reports. 
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Starting from this info, an analysis can be done to better tuning workload, prevent problems and so on.  

Currently Workload Automation customers are moving increasingly to dynamic agent scheduling managed by Dynamic Broker component (ITDWB enterprise application). Dynamic agent scheduling introduces additional processing to the traditional one.

There are multiple processing steps between job execute notification, via mailman server, to Broker component and the final job dispatch to the remote JobManager. All these steps correspond to an internal job status in the JOB_BROKER_JOBS table in the DWB schema that map to WAIT status in the plan (which could be check using conman or the Dynamic Console). The WAIT status means, as documented, that the job is waiting to fulfill its dependencies. In this blog, it is explained how to retrieve a meaningful detailed status of Jobs.