Self-Service Arrives to Workload Automation. Have Your Users Paint Your Fence.

It’s close to 11 p.m. on the last day of the quarter. And I.T. gets an urgent request to post-pone a closing of the books process because there’s a large order stuck in the CRM system.  This means that it won’t hit the books and be recorded as a sale.  The customer won’t get her order, the salesperson won’t get paid and finance will show a missing number.

Making matters more complicated, there’s a large marketing workload to process sentiment analysis that kicks off after close of business.  That whole workload looks like this:

This generates an urgent call to the team that manages the workload automation platform: Hold the closing workflow!  Stop the presses! And postpone the Hadoop workflow.

The admins have to get to their console find the job and pause it.  Not a huge deal, except there are thousands of jobs to be run and hundreds of business people calling on a regular basis, at all kind of hours.

Some customers have created help desks for their workload automation teams or even off-shore to serve these kinds of requests.

Introducing Self-Service for workload automation.

New in Cisco Tidal Enterprise Scheduler (TES) 6.1 is the powerful, award-winning portal Cisco Services portal (acquired with newScale).

The new self-service portal empowers business users of TES business with the ability to interact with their processes in a “safe & sane” manner without IT involvement and without any technical knowledge.

In my prior example, a finance person could have postponed processing without having to go to IT.

Self Service is designed for the business user that wants to Control jobs runs that have been authorized for him/her, including commands such as
·      Launch activities
·      Re-run
·      Cancel
·      Hold
·      Resume

Self Service offer many benefits the business.
·      Cost effective means to provide extended service levels  more coverage without additional labor costs
·      Empower the user without waiting for IT teams
·      More than just a portal – It is secure with control and auditing so IT can select which users can access their jobs and log all activities those users execute against their jobs.
·      Controlled access to only authorized activities
·      Granular control of activity and actions

Control Your Hadoop Workloads on UCS from your iPhone. Yes, Thank you, Please.

With the introduction of the new version of Cisco Tidal Enterprise Scheduler (TES) and it’s ability to manage Hadoop workloads on Cisco UCS clusters, like the picture above, we are adding one last thing to simplify your life: an iPhone app!

Whether you are in a meeting, at a game or simply away from your office, now it’s possible to have visibility and control of your workloads (all of them, not just Hadoop) from your fingertips.

So let’s get the details.

Mobile Client Features
•       Leverage existing client manager (data access is needed)
•       Leverages user access/security model of TES. So users only see the jobs they manage and not the whole cluster.
•       Support multiple TES environments, not just one server.
•       The mobile client offers TES “operational” functions to a mobile worker
•       The mobile client is for the operational control activities (for example job control versus job creation)
•       Key features
•       Alerts control (View, Acknowledge, Response)
•       Connection controls (view, Enable, Reconnect, Test)
•       View events
•       Queue Control (View, Enable, Disable)
•       View job runs (View job status, output)
•       Control job runs (Hold, Cancel, Re-run, Release, Override Status, Insert)
•       View logs

This is a screenshot of the UI for inserting a job.

And here is a whole demo movie.