Best practice to ensure that schedule changes made are authorized and logged in CA Workload Automation ESP Edition

Products

• ESP Workload Automation

Issue/Introduction

We need CA's recommendation to ensure that schedule changes made in ESP are authorized and logged. Some options may include:

- Separation of schedule change approvals and implementations.
- Logging of schedule changes
- Alerts when schedule is changed

Environment

CA WA ESP 11.4 Z/OS

Resolution

Here are the guidelines we recommand:
- Schedule changes should be validated by the users in application team and/or scheduling team. Note: critical/complex changes should involve Production Control people to review. And commonly used ESP method for validation:
Run SIMULATE after the change and make sure it works as expected;

Following methods can help to monitor the changes:
1. Set proper ESP security profile to prevent unauthorized users from changing the events; And non-ESP security on the library where ESP procs are stored can prevent users from changing the ESP Procedures;
2. Command “L LEVEL(-) LASTUPD” can be used to check when the events were changed;
3. ESP6099I indicates that the event has been updated, it can be monitored.

- Change management product (like CA ENDEVOR) is normally used to manage the change. For production change, approvers are normally the Change management group, Application development and Production Control. In some cases this may be more than 3 people. In some cases the changes should be done in a test environment and then moved to production.

Additional Information

N/A