I am curious as to what everyone else is doing for runbooks and/or notes for jobs. Is it valuable for your teams, does anyone take advantage of the hyperlink capabilities by using a wiki? How do you enforce / audit for runbooks/notes data? anyone have any good tips? We currently have a sharepoint wiki based system but it is somewhat painful to maintian links (we used jobname and jobnames change, retire, etc).
Anyone notice that JOBID isn't a variable you can leverage for constructing the URL you are limited to Job Name Job Alias, Job Run ID, Job External ID Job Class, Agent Name, Master. Why aren't all variables enabled in the runbook notes section?
Runbook automation
A thought we are investigating on our side was to automate creation of runbooks, then let teams fill out the data either just after putting the job into produciton (handover) or augmenting when something fails.
We have moved towards a file based wiki system called dokuwiki which makes for some interesting options for us
Solution with some promise:
I created some SQL extracts from tidal DB and have put them into multiple files (details (name, cmd params), job group variables, job file dep, job dep, job notes)
Then we use some jobs using powershell to glue all of these together based on jobid in a file that the wiki reads into a template (we needed a wiki namespace to put the files in and permissions to write them here as our runtime user). the fact that this is file based is key.
issues:
<jobid> isn't something I can leverage to "change" the url dynamically for each job, so I have to find a way to update it
jobid doesn't necessarily equal jobalias so we didn't want to use that.
We didn't want to use job name because we run the same "name" but with diff parameters often enough and that would throw off the job data augmentation.
I can automate the runbook updates with SACMD utility which is easy enough but it's another step and could be slicker if I can use <jobid> in the URL to dynamically change all jobs could use the same reference url
For Example:http://<wikiroot>/<wikiname>.php?id=<namespace:tidal>:<jobid>
Runbook retirement: When jobs retire we would look to automate the creation of a jobid list (all jobs = disabled and in our retirement group ) and then remove the appropriate files from the wiki server using powershell remove-item based on list = <jobid>.txt
Itis still a work in progress and I need to see if this will translate into 6.1 + but I will share more on the progress we make.
