Azure Batch is cloud-scale job scheduling and compute management.
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JAMS
Score 8.3 out of 10
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JAMS is a centralized workload automation and job scheduling solution that runs, monitors, and manages jobs and workflows. Reliably orchestrate the critical IT processes that run your business from a single pane of glass.
To better serve their consumers, businesses that often interact with those clients who rely on Microsoft's software products may consider migrating to Azure. This program would be useful in any installation of a Microsoft product or suite that necessitates a test of the target environment. It is simple to maintain and implement, making it an ideal IT backbone. If a client doesn't have any use for this particular instrument, it's not going to be of any benefit to them.
The best environment is where you have lots of jobs from lots servers and need a history of detailed failures. Our web server, SQL server and App server all have applications that need scheduling. It wouldn't be necessary if you have a just a handful of jobs for which you can use task manager.
It would be very helpful if the application had the ability to display help text based on where the cursor is hovering on the screen. There are many times when a brief explanation of an on-screen prompt would be very handy. For example, when you attempt to Cancel a job from the Monitor, you are presented with the checkbox that says "Reprocess completion?" It would be very nice if you could hover over the prompt and see a pop-up help screen that explains what happens if you check this checkbox. The same applies to all the checkbox options presented when you attempt to "Release" a job from the Monitor.
JAMS is a critical resource free up people to do other things and ensuring that processes and tasks are run consistently. We are also confident that procedures are run consistently and on time or as soon as the necessary data is available. With automated job failure notification, we are not required to check that jobs are running correctly.
9/10 as there are so many features I have not tried as of yet. It is easy to get started but as jobs become more complex you tend to employ more and more features - Some of which can be complicated at first. This all comes down to experience using the system. Out first setup and current setup are vastly different as we learn how to use the full power.
We didnt really encounter any downtime, no issues encountered during 2 years of use of JAMs also our client barely raise an issue with JAMS, mostly the issues is on the batch jobs that jams executes. So I would gave it a perfect 10, very reliable hardly encounters any error and bug
JAMS performance is very great, there are no issues raised with the performance, it just like nothing happens on the job after integration it gives you this monitoring capability, no reports and bugs raised on the performance, we didnt do integration with other software only database and with use of JAMS agent to different servers
From go live in 2012 to current, issues submitted, even if low priority, and could wait, are usually responded to in a few hours, most have been resolved the same day, or over a few days with interactive help from them (low priority question like how do I do this). Example questions have been what order to restart services. What ports are used by JAMS for our IT Group to open up the firewall for. The few Production issues we had are always responded to in a timely manner, usually within 15 minutes or sooner, even overnight issues.
I Was not part of the original Implementation, and the persons did that are no longer with the Organization. But I was part of the recent Upgrade process a year ago and I am the JAMS admin and was very pleased
They both are great tools and provide the services they have implemented. They are two competing companies that have different cultures and forward mission agendas. I would say Azure is a little easier to support through their user interface for the IT support side of things. Both tools are useful and have their own strength and weakness. If you're a dynamic company with a multitude of customers then both are a required tool to have.
Our team vetted a competing software, VisualCron, feedback as follows: 1. Difficult to use. 2. Questionable customer service - Language barrier and did not respond to request for demo video recording. 3. VisualCron seems more powerful but with that it is more difficult to use if you do not wish to do more extensive coding to customise it.
I can only speak in in regards to scalability in the volume of jobs we have created. Many of our jobs exist in multiple environments, with each environment having its own unique folder names, connection strings, etc. We incorporate parameters on the folder level that contain the unique environment information. The jobs reference these values from the folder they are contained in, so we can easily copy a job from DEV to TEST and the source is the same but the values passed from the parameters are not. This makes it very easy to create many new jobs and copy them across multiple environments and have them work.
Using JAMS when working from home (initially COVID, and now permanent) gives me tremendous visibility into the running operations of our business without any loss in productivity for not being in the office.
With JAMS I can more tightly schedule evening batch jobs by running one job after the successful completion of predecessor, as opposed to the CRON like guessing at safe start times.
Central control on a monitored server in a datacenter for all job scheduling tasks has given us 99.9% uptime reliability, instead of herding cats on multiple machines.
