Cron Scheduler

The Unix operating system includes a scheduling program called Cron. With Cron you can easily specify both simple and very complex schedules.

A schedule is specified using an expression consisting of five fields: minute, hour, day of month, month, and day of week. A field can consist of a single value, a comma separated list of values, or a range of values. An asterisk can also be used for "every."

The simple cron expression 0 10 * * * is a schedule to do something a 10:00 am every day. The more complex expression 0 10,11,12-14 1 1-3 * specifies 10:00 am, 11:00 am, 12:00 noon, 1:00 pm, and 2:00 pm on the first day of January, February, and March.

For more information, see the Wikipedia article on cron.

 

 

 

ArteMon Scheduling

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ArteMon's Schedule Manager allows you to schedule various tasks, much as the Cron scheduler in Unix. Unlike Cron, however, ArteMon provides a dialog for specifying the schedule, so you don't have to deal with cron expressions.

ArteMon Jobs

ArteMon provides the following jobs that you can schedule: 1) start monitoring, 2) stop monitoring, 3) run task, and 4) generate Jasper report.

You may not want or need to monitor your system 24 hours per day, seven days per week. The start and stop monitoring jobs allow you to monitor only selected time periods.

The run task job allows you to run any external program or script.

You can also automate the generation of Jasper Reports. The generate Jasper report job executes a Jasper report template on the schedule you supply.

Internal Jobs

ArteMon uses the Schedule Manager for various internal jobs. These include deleting old files from the monitoring database, and aggregating data from the monitor database into the aggregation database. Internal jobs are also used to remove old log files.

Job Log

The Schedule Manager creates a detailed log of all of the jobs it runs, including internal jobs.