Concepts Overview
Theme: Overview | Who is it for? Administrators, automation engineers, and business analysts who need to understand how OpCon models work
What Is It?
This section explains the core building blocks of OpCon automation — the objects, rules, and behaviors that define how work is scheduled, run, and tracked. Understanding these concepts is essential before building or operating any automated workflow.
When Would You Use It?
- You need to define how work is scheduled, run, and tracked using This section explains the core building blocks of OpCon automation — the objects, rules, and behaviors that
Why Would You Use It?
- Centralized control: This section explains the core building blocks of OpCon automation — the objects, rules, and behaviors that define how work is scheduled, run, and tracked
When would you use this section?
- Learning how OpCon works before building automation
- Explaining OpCon's model to a colleague or stakeholder
- Designing a new automated workflow and selecting the right object types
- Troubleshooting unexpected job or schedule behavior
What is in this section?
| Topic | Description |
|---|---|
| Schedules | How OpCon groups jobs into business processes that build and run on a calendar |
| Jobs | The individual units of work OpCon submits to agents and platforms |
| Job Types | Platform-specific job definitions (Windows, UNIX, IBM i, SAP, SQL, and more) |
| Master vs. Daily | The difference between master definitions and daily runtime instances |
| Schedule Dates | How OpCon names, numbers, and manages schedule dates |
| Frequencies | Calendar rules that control when jobs and schedules qualify to run |
| Agents | The machines and machine groups that run jobs |
| Properties | Global and instance-level variables used in job and schedule definitions |
| Instances | Named schedule instances and multi-instance behavior |
| Job and Schedule Statuses | The status lifecycle for jobs and schedules in the daily queue |
| Thresholds and Resources | Numeric counters and resource pools used to coordinate job execution |
| Job Components | Frequencies, events, dependencies, tags, and other job-level settings |
| Embedded Scripts | Reusable scripts stored in OpCon and deployed to agents at runtime |
| Job Tracking | Tracking externally-initiated jobs within OpCon |
| File Transfer Jobs | How OpCon manages file movement between machines |
| Null Jobs | Placeholder jobs used for dependency organization |
| Time Zones | How OpCon handles time zone offsets across agents and schedules |
Glossary
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Calendar | An OpCon object that defines non-working days (Holiday Calendar) or specific run dates (Annual Plan Calendar) used by job and schedule frequencies. |
| Dependency (Job Dependency) | A condition that must be met before a job is allowed to start. OpCon supports job dependencies, threshold dependencies, resource dependencies, and expression dependencies. |
| Job | A task or activity defined in OpCon, such as running a program on a remote machine, transferring files, or running a sub-schedule. |
| Machine (Machine (Agent)) | An execution target for OpCon jobs. Each machine runs an agent that communicates with the OpCon server and runs submitted jobs. |
| Resource | A user-defined object with a name and a numeric limit. Used to restrict how many jobs run concurrently across schedules and machines in OpCon. |
| Role | A named collection of privileges that can be assigned to one or more user accounts. Users in a role inherit all of that role's privileges. |
| Schedule | A named group of jobs in OpCon that represents a business process. Schedules are built each day based on their defined frequencies and calendars. |
FAQs
Q: What does the Concepts Overview cover?
This section explains the core building blocks of OpCon automation — the objects, rules, and behaviors that define how work is scheduled, run, and tracked. Understanding these concepts is essential before building or operating any automated workflow.