Termination Status Report output inconsistency

Products

• Automic Automation Intelligence

Issue/Introduction

When running Termination report on different days, you get different results. What is causing that?

Environment

Release : 6.0.X

Component : AUTOMIC AUTOMATION INTELLIGENCE ENGINE

Cause

Configuration

Resolution

There can be a few reasons why the output for the same Termination Report is inconsistent.

The most common reasons are listed below:

1) In many cases, the Report criteria used to determine the jobs to get the termination status from is by Jobstream name CONTAINS:

Example:

JobStream Name contains JOBSTREAMNAME1_P_C OR

JobStream Name contains JOBSTREAMNAME2_P_C OR

JobStream Name contains JOBSTREAMNAME3_P_C

...

This means that if someone added/deleted another jobstream with one of those same strings in it, there could be more/less runs shown in a subsequent run of the report since something like JOBSTREAMNAME1_P_C_1 and JOBSTREAMNAME2_P_C_2 would both be included. Even though the jobstream may be newer, it could have run history within the timeframe specified in the Report controls. It is definitely something that could cause differences.

In such cases, our recommendation is to use 'Matches' instead of 'Contains' for the reports - 'Contains' is one of the possible reasons there is different output in the report. 

2) Another reason is using auto-trim of the jobstreams. This means that the jobs that are part of the jobstream can change automatically behind the scenes as run frequencies are updated by the Statistics Generator (generally once per day). Since the report is generated using Jobstream Name, that should pull the runs for the jobs that are currently in the JobStream_Job table and that table is updated as auto-trimming is applied (AutoSys V1). The number of jobs in the jobstream can change with auto-trimming, so the counts of runs for a specific period can change if the report is run again on a different day.

3. Database maintenance.

4. If the report is defined to be as 'Last X' days - if you run such report on different days, you will get different results in the Termination Report since, even though selected amount of days is the same, the range will be different.

Example: 

If you run Termination report on 16th of November that has 'last 3 days' defined in its criterion, you will get 13th, 14th, and 15th of November. If you run the same report in on 18th of November, you will get 15th, 16th and 17th of November. The numbers in the report may vary significantly.