Job Scheduler options

[Nigel_Pain]

SAS 9.4M7 on Windows 2019

I suspect there is no good answer to this but it's worth a try. We have had users using OS Scheduling within SAS Schedule Manager to schedule regular jobs for some years. We recently upgraded our Windows servers from 2012 R2 to 2019 and following this the scheduling stopped working. Tasks appeared in the Task Scheduler but they never run and there doesn't even appear to be any indication that they ran but failed. The Last Run Result is always 0x41303, which I think is "Task has never run". I raised this with Tech Support and they pointed out that it should never have worked because you're supposed to need local admins in order to be able do this. And the documentation clearly says this too:

https://go.documentation.sas.com/doc/en/bicdc/9.4/scheduleug/n05akp7m9jxhzfn1coz5nepy7zxf.htm 

However, it did in 2012 R2 (go figure!).

We don't licence LSF and workstation restrictions mean we can't schedule EG projects. We did also try using the DIP Scheduler but that doesn't seem to run jobs as individual users, which is needed for file permissions and database access. So I'm wondering if anyone has any suggestions for getting some kind of job scheduling working? 

Thanks

[SASKiwi]

We run a similar SAS environment to yourselves. In my experience, the only way to get industrial-strength scheduling in SAS 9.4 is with a third-party scheduler. IMHO, OS scheduling doesn't provide enough functionality and flexibility. For example you can't have file event triggers. We use the OEM version of LSF provided as part of our SAS licence and I can confirm that it is indeed up to the task. It provides both time and file event triggers, custom time events like local holidays and a separate GUI interface to monitor schedule history, review job definitions, and kill jobs. SAS Management Console remains the primary scheduling interface and it is just a matter of choosing LSF / Platform Process Manager when setting up a new scheduled job. Also there's no problem with using non-admin individual user accounts. In my view, paying a bit extra for a third-party scheduler is well worth it.

[Nigel_Pain]

Thanks for the response.

In an ideal world I'd probably just licence LSF and use that. But I don't manage the contract and the people who do are averse to spending, as they'd see it, even more on a very expensive contract.

As far as the functionality and flexibility is concerned, OS scheduling did everything we needed it to. Users (a pretty small number, TBH) just wanted to be able to schedule jobs to run daily, providing the latest snapshot of their live data to their business folk.

I am looking to see if we can get LSF added in to the contract, especially as I've identified a couple of products we could happily drop, but I don't hold out many hopes. I think it'll depend upon what difference it would make to the overall cost.

[AhmedAl_Attar]

Hi @Nigel_Pain 

If cost is an issue, would Open Source Job Scheduler be an option to your organization?

I did quick search (Not endorsing any one), and found this

• JS7 JobScheduler  (SourceForge link: https://sourceforge.net/projects/jobscheduler/)
• schedulix

Just a thought!?

[Nigel_Pain]

Hi Ahmed

It's an option I suppose, but I don't think other schedulers would integrate with SAS. Users need to be able to schedule the jobs from their workstations and the only server access available to them is via SAS Management Console, Enterprise Guide and SAS Studio. But the suggestion is appreciated.

[LinusH]

An alternative to 3rd party schedulers is to use the SAS Job Flow Scheduler (requires a license though).

Even if it used wintask in the background, it should be able to use metadata authentication, and is available throughout your SAS applications.

It's SAS way to deploy grid capabilities without LSF, but it's not really enterprise scheduling SW, it still lacks file triggers.

[SASKiwi]

@LinusH  - From what I understand, the SAS Job Scheduler also lacks job environment variables for passing parameters into batch programs.