Job Tracking
The Job Tracking feature allows external (user-submitted or program-submitted) jobs to be monitored for progress by OpCon. It enables OpCon to become aware of jobs that were started by external users or operating systems rather than started by an OpCon schedule or event. This feature tracks jobs that are defined in OpCon and by the operating system agent.
For most operating systems, consequently, this feature is limited because it is reporting about a job that has already started. This means that no OpCon dependencies, resources, or thresholds can constrain the job.
Additionally, this also means that OpCon properties cannot be used in any way to define the job. However, like other jobs defined in OpCon, a job history can be maintained and subsequent jobs can be made dependent upon a Tracked job.
Automatic Job Tracking
The Automatic Job Tracking feature allows external (user-submitted or program-submitted) jobs to be monitored for progress by OpCon. This feature is similar to Job Tracking, except that it does not require a job to be defined in OpCon, and it may also reduce or eliminate definitions stored by the operating system agent.
Since there is no job master record for an automatically tracked job, there can be no job history accumulated. Subsequent jobs cannot be made dependent on an automatically tracked job since there is no job master record or job history.
A typical purpose for Automatic Job Tracking would be to monitor the job-by-job progress of jobs in an OpCon schedule as new jobs appear within the schedule. Automatic Job Tracking greatly reduces the preparation for monitoring schedules that may initiate a large and complex series of sub-jobs, for example, when a job that is defined on that schedule will submit many other sub-jobs (so they are not directly started by OpCon and would not otherwise appear on the schedule).
Job Queuing
The Job Queuing feature allows external (user-submitted or program-submitted) jobs to be queued for processing by OpCon. This feature is like Job Tracking in that it requires jobs to be defined by OpCon and the operating system agent.
Job Queuing enables OpCon to become aware of jobs that are started by external users or an operating system, as opposed to jobs started by an OpCon schedule or event. However, queuing means that the OpCon agent has intercepted the job start request and has prevented the job from running until after OpCon decides the job is allowed to run. This means that queued jobs can be subjected to dependencies on previous jobs and on resources and thresholds.
Most job definition parameters (except for the Job Start Command) can be overridden, sometimes using OpCon properties. It is also possible for OpCon to support platform-specific job features, such as job-level message management, report routing control, and managing a local data area associated with a job that cannot otherwise be managed directly by OpCon from outside of the platform-specific operating system.