What is cron?
Cron is a job scheduler for UNIX and UNIX-like operating systems. Cron is used to schedule tasks to run at fixed times, such as a certain day of the week or day of the month. Cron automates system maintenance and scheduled tasks. The crontab file is the file type that contains the schedule of cron entries slated to be run and at specified times.
Cron is a common elemental automation tool. An elemental automation approach is often script-driven, relying on platform-specific point tools like Cron. Other common point tools for scheduling tasks include SQL Server Agent, Windows Task Scheduler, and freeware task schedulers. Relying on scripts offers a temporary fix that often becomes insufficient and overly complex, requiring frequent maintenance and manual workarounds to update scripts, resulting in higher costs, missed SLAs, operational bottlenecks, and additional system downtime. This approach also often creates costly barriers to scalability because these scheduling tools and plugins traditionally lack enterprise-wide governance and must be implemented on a piecemeal basis, thus being expensive to modify.
IT organizations looking to stay ahead of tomorrow’s business needs must employ a modern automation solution designed for an accelerating rate of change.
Take A Better Approach: ActiveBatch’s Architectural Approach
ActiveBatch is a script-language independent workload automation and job scheduling solution that enables teams to automate and orchestrate cross-platform IT and business processes.
ActiveBatch features date/time scheduling options for running jobs at specific times, such as a day of week or day of month. This is achieved through the use of calendars, time zones, custom tags, and more. Users can schedule workflows based on the business day so that scheduled tasks run as they should.
ActiveBatch's Integrated Jobs Library provides hundreds of prebuilt job actions that make it easy to develop reliable, cross-platform workflows. This means cron job runs can be kicked off by ActiveBatch. Plus, it can all be completed without any custom scripts, which would be difficult with a basic task scheduler. End-to-end workflows make it easier to deliver real-time data and to manage dependencies across the enterprise. With dozens of extensions for popular applications, users can build and automate complex workflows from a central coordination point. ActiveBatch also supports connecting to API endpoints and can perform command line functions.
Integrate Virtually Any Solution or Technology on the Market
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All major operating systems, including Windows, Linux, UNIX, and IBM iSeries AS/400
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Other job schedulers, including cron jobs and Windows Task Scheduler
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Applications from IBM, Microsoft, SAP, VMware, Amazon, and more
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Multiple back-end databases like SQL Server, Azure SQL, and Oracle DBs
ActiveBatch fully supports the Windows Security Model, including Kerberos and Active Directory, allowing organizations to make use of their existing accounts and groups for simpler management and security. ActiveBatch is an object-oriented system, so all User Accounts are objects. As a result, all Jobs associated with the User Account require just one change to the User Account Object rather than multiple changes to each Job.
Powerful Automation and Orchestration Capabilities
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Provide data in real-time
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Protect existing script investments through lifecycle management capabilities
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Manage the provisioning of on-premise and cloud infrastructure resources
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Use load balancing to reduce wait times
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Provide alerting; Each alert is deliverable using a variety of delivery methods that include email, writing to the event log file, JMS and Microsoft Message Queues, SMS, Twitter, SNMP, Office Communicator, and more.