Self Serve: JobCenter

Do you need to provide a secure way to run ad-hoc administrative operations? Can you delegate routine processes to people outside your team? Do you need a flexible web-based administrative control dashboard? Do you need to execute actions across many nodes on a network using tags and other filtering criteria?

The JobCenter webapp is a graphical tool to schedule and run any command or script. Internally, JobCenter embeds CTL and provides web access to CTL's control dispatching framework.

JobCenter gives the administrative staff a single interface to schedule, run and track the execution of commands and workflows. In addition to being a handy alternative to the CTL command line interface, JobCenter is also useful for delegating tasks to non-technical staff.

Besides its integration with CTL, JobCenter also integrates with ReportCenter. All job activity is maintained in ReportCenter so you have a history of what jobs have run, their status, who ran them, etc.

Current Features:

• Web-based execution of any command (both ad-hoc and defined)
• Executes actions across machines based on tag names and other filtering criteria
• Web-based creation, scheduling, and execution of jobs
• XML-based job creation and scheduling
• Built-in job scheduler
• Built-in fine-grain access control
• Enables teams to follow the execution of important jobs
• Safely delegate commands and jobs to lesser skilled staff or other groups

Upcoming Features:

• Network interface to enable 3rd party tools to submit and check status on jobs

JobCenter (along with CTL, ReportCenter, and Workbench) is installed by the ControlTier installer.

Go here for instructions on how to use the ControlTier installer

The JobCenter application is installed and configured via the ControlTier installer so getting started is easy.

Choose: Start off by going to the JobCenter main page. You can go to the JobCenter URL directly, or navigate to it from ReportCenter or Workbench.

You can choose to run a job that has already been defined or you can define a new one.

Create: Creating a job is easy. The process is really just a matter of choosing a command you want to run. Start by pressing the "Create a new Job..." button.

You can upload a job definition described in an XML file or you can define one right in the JobCenter UI. To define your job in JobCenter, choose the command you want to run, configure any options it might use and then decide how and when you want to run it. Jobs can be run on a scheduled basis. You can save a job so you can run it any time. Finally, you can run it just once.

Run: To run a job, you first go to the JobCenter home page, and choose the job you want to run. Press the "Run job" button and it will add the job to the execution queue.

Once the job starts executing, you can monitor its progress. The progress meter will calculate its completion based on average times it maintains in its metrics database. You can also view the output in real time.

The job output can be followed by pressing the "output". This brings you to the job execution page where the last lines of output are displayed in real time. Once the job has completed you can download all the output as a text file.