A question was posted on the maestro-l mailing list recently about if it’s possible to run a custom SQL report to show cancelled jobs for a particular date range, or to search for a job name specifically. The responses pointed out that the plan audit information is not stored in the TWS database itself, so you’d have to grep through the audit logs on the Master Domain Manager to find what you were looking for. Not the most taxing of problems, but it still requires someone, you probably, to log onto the Master each time and do the searches over multiple files.
The raw logs aren’t that good to look at so you probably need to put them in a spreadsheet too which is another step:
CONMAN |20150106|170519|20150106|170519| PLJBSTRM|MODIFY | | twsadmin| | TWSMDM#ONLINE1704528076[(1704 01/06/15),(ONLINE1704528076)]|cs TWSMDM#ONLINE1704528076;schedid
CONMAN |20150106|170540|20150106|170540| PLJBSTRM|ADD | | twsadmin| | TWSMDM#ONLINEBANKCONV[(1705 01/06/15),(0AAAAAAAAAAAAAKI)]|sbs TWSMDM#ONLINEBANKCONV;noask
CONMAN |20150106|172718|20150106|172718| PLJBSTRM|ADD | | twsadmin| | TWSMDM#ONLINEBANK[(1727 01/06/15),(0AAAAAAAAAAAAAKJ)]|sbs TWSMDM#ONLINEBANK;noask
PLAN |20150106|222147|20150106|222147| PLJOB |MODIFY | TWSMDM| joebloggs| | TWSMDM#MAES_BATCH2315[(2315 01/06/15),(0AAAAAAAAAAAAAEC)].MAES_BATCH2315_1|adddep job=TWSMDM#MAES_BATCH2315[(2315 01/06/15),(0AAAAAAAAAAAAAEC)].MAES_BATCH2315_1;priority=11
This kind of activity is required when performing a witch-hunt fact-finding appraisal of who cancelled that really important job last week. There are many, many little benefits of using TWS/WebAdmin to work with your TWS batch, and there’s one for this requirement too.
The plan and database audit logs are available to be searched on directly from the TWS/WebAdmin interface.
Like pretty much every screen in TWS/WebAdmin, it’s possible to set powerful filters to search for the items you’re looking for. In this context, we’ll be searching through the audit logs on the Master but the same filtering is used when browsing the plan or the database. Any filter I set can be saved and shared with other users.
I can search through the logs based on a date or range of dates, a userid, an action type or can just enter the conman command used, with wildcards, to get what I need.
The retrieved data has been formatted into readable columns and I can add it an Excel spreadsheet with a single click.
Ready to be mailed.
Similarly, if I wanted to know what happened with the payroll jobs, I can use wildcards to show me all actions that were taken, and by whom.
The smoking gun.
As these reports are available to all and easy to understand, the users themselves can do the leg work when it comes to finding out the employee who’s shortly to be sent for re-education. Or you can remove the capability for some users completely. Every menu and action in TWS/WebAdmin can be shown or removed from a user or a group of users very easily. If they don’t need to use a function, just remove it from view to avoid confusion and they’ll never know it was there.
Another extremely useful feature, that can be made available to your admins, is the ability to search through the TWSMERGE log directly from the TWS/WebAdmin browser:
Predefined categories are available, if you wanted to search for all mailman messages, for example.
But if you’re looking for a particular error message, you can use case-insensitive searches to troubleshoot a problem more quickly with the browser.
You or your users don’t have to pull an account password, physically log on to the Master and struggle with vi, or God forbid, Notepad as it’s all done through the TWS/WebAdmin browser. It’s a small little piece of helpful functionality, but small things add up, and TWS/WebAdmin is full of things like this.
Mark Delaney
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