We recently had a great first AMA session on this sub-forum. Our Principal Sales Engineer David Fleishman, and Product Management Director Paul Wade shared their wealth of knowledge.

In case you've missed it or want a recap, I've documented all of the questions and answers here for your convenience.

Q. What types of custom information would you find most valuable to track or filter on using Custom Fields? 

A. I can think of one use case, where if you had a large application, and you wanted to break that down into smaller chunks to better monitor that application.  So an example would be an Application like PAYROLL,  I could create a new field called APP2 and put in the value like PAYD - For Payroll Daily,  PAYW - Payroll Weekly, PAYM - Payroll Monthly. 

Q. Can you share any tips or best practices for organizing Zeke jobs and events at scale? 

A. Best way is to use the APPLICATION / GROUP fields to manage large applications. This way you can sort out those fields.

If you have migrated and started using the Zeke web Server and are using the browser, you can create Custom Views, these views will filter on fields like the Group, Application, Job Name etc. These views once created are perm to your profile. Every time you log off and on, they will come. In a future release of the Web Server, these views will be sharable.

Q. Is there a way to get predecessors and successors via batch utility currently or in the future in particular in one job all together too?

A. Using the batch utility program, you can run a PATH report. With a recent release you can now run the PATH command with a future date, like running a forecast; it will show you the SUCC/PRED of the entire job flow. 

I'm including the link to the manual for the Zeke Path command.

Q. For some of our accounts, there will be a need for a distributed version of Zeke. Would that be Zena and/or Enterprise Orchestrator (includes job scheduling and that was built using Zena)? Is there a conversion process from Zeke to Zena? 

A1. You are correct that Zena and Enterprise Orchestrator (EO) are our distributed workload automation tools. It would be possible to convert Zeke events to Zena/EO tasks and have them run and coordinated from either of those products. Zena and EO are similar in capabilities, the main difference being that EO is positioned for DevOps environments and has more integrations to DevOps tools, such as Ansible, Jenkins, for example.

Both products provide exceptional environments for scheduling, managing, and controlling workflows.

A2. Is there a conversion process from Zeke to Zena? If you are also talking about migrating completely from Zeke to EO or Zena, you are moving from a Mainframe Scheduler to a Distributed Scheduler, which can do both Mainframe / Distributed scheduling. Yes, there is a conversion process to migrate from Zeke to Zena/EO, but it is a service that we provide. 

Q. What is a feature in Zeke that a lot of users don't know about? And how does this feature benefit users? 

A. One of your newest features is EMAIL notifications. Using an EMAIL task, you can now send out an email if an event ABENDS / Completes successfully. You do need to have a zAgent installed. Zeke can also do FTP/SFTP now using the same zAgent.

Q. We have a number of job streams that are scheduled to run multiple times a day, and recur is more than 1. These events refresh themselves whether they complete successfully or fail. How can we better note that a job failed and handle a possible rerun? Is having an SCOM/ZCOM to rebuild the job stream to run again better than having the events run multiple times? 

A. That depends on how you want to handle these job streams, Multiple reoccurring jobs are a good way to run a job stream multiple times a day, If it's only once or twice, then its best practice to just set up separate job streams and use the EVENT NAME to control the triggering of the jobs. If the streams run more than that, then recurring jobs are a good way to go. You can use an EMAIL task to notify you that an event has failed. 

Also, if you have the Zeke Exit that interfaces with a ticketing system, you can automatically cut tickets; just remember this is a USER EXIT. We allow for these exits, but we do not support them because they are maintained by the user/client.   

If you have the Zeke Web Browser installed, you can do RestAPI calls to a ticketing system as well to cut tickets.