Management of critical path

In addition to the handling of critical jobs based on Workload Manager, IBM Z Workload Scheduler provides the dynamic handling of the critical path calculated by the daily planning batch jobs process.

The critical path is the path, within a network of jobs, with the least slack time.

The slack time, in a critical job predecessor path, is the amount of time that processing of the predecessor jobs can be delayed without exceeding the deadline of a critical job. It is the spare time calculated using the deadline, input arrival, and duration settings of predecessor jobs.

The capabilities include:
  • Monitoring of critical job predecessors that are late, long running, or ended with an error. This process uses the same internal logic that the scheduler applies to monitor alert conditions.
  • Monitoring of the paths that are consuming their slack time, becoming more critical than the paths calculated at plan generation.
  • Enhanced critical jobs monitoring, using ISPF dialog flows.
  • Back-end support for new views available using the Dynamic Workload Console.