UC4Blog
A technical UC4 Fan Blog
Upgrade Helpers - Impact Analysis
"What's
the impact of the upgrade on our UC4 system?" or "Is this hotfix
relevant for us?"
These are interesting questions, and the quest for answers is what I call
"Impact Analysis".
The task is to find out which parts of the Release-Notes are relevant for your
UC4-System, and define actions for them.
In the course of my Impact Analysis I also check the influence of the upgrade
on system specials such as SQL-based reporting. If the upgrade changes the DB
schema, the reporting might have to be adopted, too.
Part of this "Impact Analysis" is specific for a UC4-System, so it must be done individually for your environment. For all other parts I use a set of self-written queries and tools.
Upgrade Helpers - The Prod-Copy
At the UC4 Innovate User Conference in Berlin, two topics were omnipresent behind closed doors :
- The latest Gartner market analysis of the workload automation market, where Gartner first listed UC4 as one of the three market leaders. On the UC4 homepage http://www.uc4.com there is currently a link to request the analysis, they'll send it to you.
- Customers who do not want to upgrade to a current version of UC4, obviously mostly because they fear the risk for their production processes.
Between these two things that seem to be unrelated at first glance, there is a connection, because Gartner mentions these upgrade-resistant clients in the "caution" section for UC4 in the market analysis. Of course, they mainly mean AppWorx customers who don't want to upgrade to the Automation Engine, but also among Operations Manager customers , there are many companies that use an old version and haven't (yet) thought of updating.
From my experience, from a technical perspective, the three critical points for a successful upgrade are: the test system (and of course, the tests themselves), the impact analysis, and the agent upgrade. Therefore I'll write an own article for each of these three upgrade-milestones.
UC4 Innovate 2012 EMEA - Off-Road
Last
week, the "UC4 Innovate 2012 EMEA" took place in Berlin, and it was a
great event! UC4 organized everything perfectly: Hotel, evening event, German
and English lectures, and Information booths. There were a lot of UC4 employees
from Austria, Germany, the USA, and probably a few other countries, so as a
visitor you had no excuse to travel home with unanswered questions.
On the last day in the afternoon, I had a short presentation of a couple of UC4
use cases in the German Session.
If you were there and saw my presentation, then I would appreciate to get
your feedback - please write a comment
in the Blog or send me an email to admin@UC4Blog.com
Unused Agents
Last month Mark Cheek from Oklahoma sent me an email, he was trying to identify unused Windows-Agents and asked me for help.
He wrote that he has a greater number of UC4 Agents for Windows, and some of them are no longer in use, and he would like to find out which Agents haven't executed any jobs in the past 30 days. I thought it was an interesting request and readily helped Mark.
Agents can be used by many different object types, and this makes the query potentially costly. Since the effort to consider every possible use is probably not worthwhile, I limit the query to objects of the types JOBS, JOBF and EVNT, in an analysis of the result set you can then add further uses of Agents.
License Check
Whether as a test license key or for temporary use until an order is processed, I've often seen temporary licenses in an UC4 system, sometimes for very long periods of time.
License expiry can be very uncomfortable, especially if you have to obtain extended licenses under the pressure of already expired licenses in your system.
If you use temporary licenses every now and then, then monitor them and be informed two weeks before any expiration!
Extend UserInterface functionality
A very
handy feature of the UC4 UserInterface is the adaptable SendTo menu.
It
enables you to activate external programs and internal objects directly from
the context menu of the UserInterface, and pass objects or activities as a parameter.
This
means that you can extend UserInterface functionality, your custom new
functions are then available with a simple mouse click.
Practical examples:
- Setting up notifications for active tasks
- Export multiple objects into individual XML files using the object name as a file name
- Replicate activities to a different client / another UC4 system
- Trigger mass object changes
- ...
End of the Calendar
The end of the year is approaching, and many offices are almost deserted in this supposedly contemplative time. Just at this time of the year, there are some special tasks, such as the annual financial statements and the holiday shopping season. If you are one of the chosen ones who must hold the fort, then this article should help save you from a small misfortune that might occur at the end of the year: The end of the calendar ... I mean a UC4 calendar, of course.
Same Job, different Client
A task
that probably affects every UC4 Administrator at some point, is the transport
of objects from one client to another, usually to transport solutions from the
QA environment to the PROD.
Often, objects on the target clients should run with other attributes than on
the source client, for example different HOST for JOBS or JOBF.
At
"Integrate 2010" in Texas, Gene Krokosz and Jim Beck presented some
techniques for this "Common Task". Unfortunately I wasn't there to
here it live, but the presentation is very informative, the PDF is available
for download at https://support.uc4.com/fileadmin/files/events/Integrate_2010_Texas/019T_PromoteToProduction.pdf.
For transports from QA to PROD I mainly use "Method 2" from the
presentation, the Change Utility.
Besides
that, we also have some of the same processes on multiple PROD- clients,
because we automate processes for the same application in parallel for several
associate companies.
Since late 2006, we use an advanced version of "Method 1" from the
above mentioned presentation, with JOBIs and VARAs. Here's a short description
of this automation.
SQL vs Application Interface
In early November I encountered two completely different viewpoints on the use of SQL and the UC4.ApplicationInterface.
An UC4 senior consultant said he would use the Application Interface even for a task like listing all child objects of a ProcessFlow, because it is an UC4-standard interface, while the database structure could change from one version to another. I describe how to solve this task using SQL on http://www.uc4blog.com/uc4blog/sql-children-and-parents-of-processflows-and-schedules/
An UC4
partner prefers SQL so much that he would even like to create objects using
SQL.
Here, I
put in my two cents.
Thanks to Stefan Kures for his valuable input on this article!
UC4-Script loop through activities
In the course of my experiments with the UC4 automation engine Version 9.00 - see also http://www.uc4blog.com/uc4blog/automation-engine-90-my-favorite-features/ - I've validated all my previous blog posts with version 9.00. All my previous articles are applicable to version 9, so my blog is compatible with automation engine v9.00.
Of course, some tasks from the various posts are easier to solve with v9.00 , I'll give you an example later in the article.
UC4 doesn't have a script element to read all activities of a client, also not in v9.00. As so often, you can solve the task with some SQL ...
Welcome to my blog!
Welcome to my UC4-Tech-Blog
Here you can find technical articles on UC4 Operations Manager
(versions 6.00 and 8.00) and the UC4 Auomation Engine (version 9.00). I describe automation approaches, helpful SQL queries, and experiences with administration of a UC4 OM system and its components.
I hope you find interesting articles, and I'm looking forward to your comments.
One last small note:
I have no direct connection to UC4 or the UC4 Software GmbH other than being a User of their software. The official, non-technical UC4-Blog can be found at http://www.uc4.com/blog
Name:
Philipp Elmer
From: Austria
UC4-User since: Summer 2006
I'm a freelancer and started in December 2000 as a Unix operator. My job always included some form of batch-processing, process-automation and scheduling.
Before working with UC4, I already scheduled with cron ;-) , Maestro and Control-M.
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