You may already have experienced a frustration when you had to stare at a screen for something to complete or manually check if something has been completed properly. Notification systems tend to answer those situations by being proactive.
In the case of scheduling systems such as Activeeon ProActive, the greatest value lies in managing finite resources, automation, long running tasks, etc. Those cases greatly benefit from alerts. Activeeon has identified this need from customers and has developed a notification system embedded into the solution and accessible in a few clicks.
We will present you in this short article 5 uses cases, but first a bit of configuration might be required.
Configuration and How To
The configuration for each workflow has been made simple with ProActive. The workflow owner has to specify the email to notify as well as the job status changes to be alerted on. For the complete documentation, you can click here. You can already try this feature in our online platform at try.activeeon.com.
For users with their own install, the scheduler will require some quick changes in the configuration file to enable the notification and connect to a mail system. For the complete documentation, you can click here.
Use Cases
Long running jobs
As mentioned above, you may already have been frustrated by staring at a job until its completion. This situation is mainly happening where the job is the actual bottleneck of a process. For instance, in R&D the results may lead to different actions from scientists. In situation where job duration can vary between 1h and 2h for instance, a notification on job termination will ensure to take actions as soon as possible without continuously watching at a screen.
Suggested notifications: Job In-Error, Job running to finished
Time critical jobs
In some cases, you will have job that are time bounded. Their completion is critical for the business. For instance, you may have to deliver some results to customers before a specific date. In that cases, you may setup the notifications on every event that will slow down the process.
Suggested notifications: Job In-Error, Job change priority, Job paused, Job pending to finished
Startup time
Notifications can also be important when resources are limited and the queue or waiting list is large. Indeed, you may be interested in following the evolution of the task executions. In that case, what really matters is to be notified when resources start to be allocated to your jobs. You will then be able to access the logs, check on the progress, visualize intermediary results, etc.
Suggested notifications: Job pending to running
Cron Jobs
When we deal with scheduler, users will also setup cron expressions to submit jobs on a regular basis. As any automated system, it is required to ensure everything is working properly. It is critical, at least in the first few iterations, to check if the job is properly submitted and there is no error.
Suggested notifications: Job submitted, Job In-Error
Access to limited resources
Finally, a scheduler such as ProActive which includes an advanced resource manager can also be used to access limited resources. This may for instance be the case when data scientists require GPU or FPGA for their computation or when a specific task require a machine with high amount of RAM. In those cases, you may be interested in monitoring the time between submission and when it started running. This will represent the queue size in minutes.
Suggested notifications: Job submitted, Job pending to running
Conclusion
In conclusion, notification may have a huge impact on IT or data scientists since it may save them time or help them collect data without the frustration of checking a screen or dashboard all the time.
Do not hesitate to try this feature on try.activeeon.com!
If you want to learn more ProActive tips, do not hesitate to check our other blog on variables.
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