Real World Best Practices with CA Workload Automation AE 11.3.6

World®
’16
Real World Best Practices With
CA Workload Automation AE 11.3.6
Deekshit Addepalli – Workload Automation Consultant, Robert Mark Technologies
MFX132S
MAINFRAME AND WORKLOAD AUTOMATION

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© 2016 CA. All rights reserved. All trademarks referenced herein belong to their respective companies.
The content provided in this CA World 2016 presentation is intended for informational purposes only and does not form any type
of warranty. The information provided by a CA partner and/or CA customer has not been reviewed for accuracy by CA.
For Informational Purposes Only
Terms of this Presentation

About RMT
§ Workload Automation Software, Professional Services and Education
Organization
§ Experience with:
– CA Workload Automation AE (CA WA AE)
– CA Workload Automation DE (CA WA dSeries)
– CA Workload Automation ESP Edition (CA WA ESP)
– CA Workload Automation CA 7 Edition (CA WA CA7)
– CA Workload Automation AutoSys® (CA WA AutoSys®) Lifecycle Management
§ Over 650 engagements in 18 years

Agenda
CA WORKLOAD AUTOMATION AE – BEST PRACTICES
WORKLOAD CONTROL CENTER – BEST PRACTICES
SECURITY (EEM)
LEVERAGING SELF-SERVICE
AGENT UPGRADE CADENCE AND BEST PRACTICES
1
2
3
4
5

CA WA AE Best Practices
§ Wherever possible, try to utilize Oracle RAC or SQL Server
Clusters to improve performance and accomplish 99.9%
uptime.
§ Try to avoid the usage of “nested boxes”.
– This reduces the overhead of recursively evaluating the starting
conditions for the child jobs/boxes
§ Try to break down box jobs into small chunks so that
workloads are more efficiently scheduled

CA WA AE Best Practices
§ Boxes that have a lot of jobs without any starting conditions increase the
time to process the RUNNING event for the box. If possible, try to serialize
the jobs by providing dependencies between jobs
§ Drop and recreate indexes frequently. Use reindexDB.pl
§ In a large environment, utilize multiple application servers and jump
servers for a each CA WA AutoSys instance so that the app server process
on the Scheduler server is not bogged down
Self Service Hint:
– Organize internal user groups via Sharepoint to let newer teams learn and publish best
practices

WCC Best Practices
§ Use an external database for WCC. Do NOT use Derby if it can be avoided.
§ Setup WCC in HA mode
– The same Database (Oracle or SQL Server) is used for multiple WCC servers
– WCC HA with SSL is supported with 11.4 SP2+
– Can be load balanced (Big-IP or similar)
§ Set the Alert deletion threshold property in Configuration to a value that is similar
to the alarm maintenance interval (also under Configuration in WCC)
Self Service Hint:
– Ensuring EEM is bound to LDAP/AD is key to enabling a Self Service model. This way,
changes to objects can be tracked by the ID that made the change.

Security Best Practices
§ Create Functional Roles
– Who is part of the CA WA AutoSys admin team?
– Who is part of the 24x7 OPS team
– What access should “users” have
– Self Service Hint: Role based access for development teams necessary
§ Enforce Naming standards
– Using as-job, as-calendar,as-sendevent (new) and as-control policies on the
WorkloadAutomationAE application can secure most of the CA WA Autosys environment.
– Use EEM to enforce naming standards
Self Service Hint:
– Job naming standards are key for EEM rollout

Security Best Practices
§ Setup EEM High Availability
– Use separate servers to setup EEM. Do not share WCC or AE servers to install
EEM.
§ Secure AutoSys (WorkloadAutomationAE) or WCC (WCC0004) or both?
– Secure the WorkloadAutomationAE application. All security authorizations are
provided by the WorkloadAutomationAE application in EEM.
– Secure the WCC0004 application to limit what the users can visually access. For
example: the administrator may want access to the Configuration tab and ECLI,
but the Users have no need to the Configuration tab.

Strategic Approach to CA WA AE using Self-Service
§ Leverage Self-Service Approach to CA WA AE
– Workload Control Center
§ Application teams interacting with their own jobs
– Critical Path Monitoring (CPM)
§ Application teams monitoring of SLA’s
– Lifecycle Management
§ Application teams creating/editing of own jobs

Strategic Approach to CA WA AE using Self-Service
§ Benefits of Self Service:
– Reduce the cost of ownership
– Increase productivity of staff
– Enterprise wide adoption of automation services
– Rapid delivery of change to production
– Increased quality of service
§ Deep understanding of business requirements
§ Proactively react to SLAs
– Scalability with minimal impact to Operational Expenditure

Agent Cadence
§ Create a set cadence to upgrade the agents X times a year
§ Best Practice: Use the N+1 cadence
– If CA released build 850 of the System Agent in May and if CA
announces build 950 of the agent today
§ Upgrade the DEV agents to build 850 – wherever possible. There will be
servers where this is not possible
§ Run through the full cycle of tests and then upgrade the TST agents to build
850
§ Finish testing in the TST environment and then plan for an upgrade of the
agents to build 850 in PRD

For assistance with anything discussed in this presentation:
Joe Geiser – Sales
T: 651.769.2574
jgeiser@robertmarktech.com
Robert Mark Technologies

Questions?

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Thank you

Real World Best Practices with CA Workload Automation AE 11.3.6

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