Stopping a running scheduled job

[Nigel_Pain]

SAS 9.4M5

Windows 2012R2 servers

(Windows 10 pro clients with EG 7.15 and SAS Management Console 9.4M5)

I've got a couple of users who I've recently set up to be able to schedule jobs via the SASMC Schedule Manager plugin and the Windows Task Scheduler. This all seems to work fine. However, one of them contacted me recently to say that a scheduled job was running and not completing, so he wanted to stop it. I was able to do that on the server by killing the process. But is there a way in which users can stop jobs which are running? They don't have direct login access to the server (eg. using RDP) so can't do what I did.

Thanks

[AnandVyas]

Hi @Nigel_Pain 

Interesting ask here.. since users do not have access to the server, one way to do it could be using code. This blog post could help with some examples for this task.

Thanks!

[Nigel_Pain]

Thanks @AnandVyas , I'll have to have a play with that. Although I'm not sure whether it'll work because this isn't sessions running through a specific port (in which case I may not be able to specify them with PROC IOMOPERATE), but a Windows Scheduled task which is configured from the SAS Job Scheduler and the SAS Data Step Batch Server.

Regards

[AnandVyas]

Even the schedule jobs would execute by spawning a SAS Session, so I believe it would be captured in the code I have share earlier.

[Nigel_Pain]

I just tested this using a test job which ran for 30 minutes. The IOMOPERATE program didn't show it. I think this is because it isn't actually spawned as such (ie. run via a spawner). It uses the operating system scheduler to run a .vbs script, which runs a batch SAS instance.

That was a potentially useful piece of code courtesy of Mr Hemedinger though.

Thanks

[SimonDawson]

The spawner will not know about this process. For this problem you are trying to solve it will not work. If I think of a solution I'll pop back in here but nothing simple is coming to mind.

[Nigel_Pain]

Hi @SimonDawson, thanks for this. I'd got pretty much the same idea via the comments in Chris Hemedinger's blog shared by @AnandVyas. Basically, if users were able to use tasklist and taskkill commands with the /s option from their workstations it might have been possible. But cmd.exe and Powershell are disabled for ordinary users on our workstations.

[boemskats]

Hi @Nigel_Pain 

On Tuesday I'll be presenting a SUGA webinar showing our Enterprise Session Monitor for SAS. The functionality that lets users manage their own workloads, including batch jobs, has been there for a while - have a look here, around 3mins 30sec into the first video (the one titled What is ESM).

Or join the webinar Tuesday - those videos are a few years old now 🙂

Nik