Features and Benefits

General Information

Monitor Jobs and Workflows

Use the Flux Operations Console web interface to monitor your jobs and workflows, all through your web browser. From the Flux Operations Console, you can check on the status of jobs and workflows, remove jobs, recover jobs that have failed, expedite jobs, pause jobs, reschedule jobs, and perform other job maintenance.

Audit Trail, Heartbeat Stauts Events, Logging

Flux includes a complete audit trail for recording significant actions that take place within Flux. Heartbeat status events allow you to monitor the health of your Flux engines and the surrounding environment. Finally, logging gives detailed information on Flux's activities, which provides useful diagnostic and monitoring information to software developers and system administrators.

Model Jobs and Workflows Visually

Create jobs and workflows using an intuitive Web-based Designer, which uses a modern Web 2.0/Ajax approach to visually design jobs and workflows.

Job Dependencies

Create jobs that run only when other jobs have finished. Jobs can be dependent on the results of prior actions, on files, on messages, and on conditions.

Timeouts

If a task, action, or process takes too long to execute, use a Flux timeout to take special corrective steps. In particular, native processes can be killed if they timeout.Similarly, if it takes too long for a message or file to arrive (or an event to occur), use a Flux timeout to stop waiting and follow appropriate steps in your workflow.

Handle Errors

When errors occur in jobs and workflows, you can handle them any way you want. After a configurable delay, you can retry failed job steps. You can notify administrators and IT personnel by email, instant message, or other configurable means. You can notify other software systems. You can run software processes to respond to the error. You can create new jobs to respond to the failed jobs.

Scripting Languages

Scripts written in scripting languages such as BeanShell and Groovy can be embedded within jobs and workflows. Any scripting language compatible with the Bean Scripting Framework (BSF) can be integrated into Flux workflows

Signals

Signals are mechanisms used to notify workflow tasks of important events within a single workflow. Using signals, you can create intricate dependencies among the various tasks in a workflow. Signals are passed strictly within a single workflow. To pass messages between different workflows, use Flux Messages (described below).

Messages

Messages are like signals, except they are passed between different jobs and workflows running in a Flux engine or across a cluster of Flux engines. Like signals, messages are used to create dependencies among different workflows and can contain data.

Business Days, Holidays, Working Hours, Non-Working Hours

Define your business days and holidays so that jobs and workflows run on working days and skip over holidays. However, you do not need to limit yourself to "whole" days. You can define working hours and non-working hours.

EXAMPLE: Suppose your working hours are Monday through Friday, except holidays, from 8:30 to 16:15, except the lunch hour from 11:30 to 12:30. You can define schedules that fire jobs only during these working hours. You can also define schedules that fire jobs only outside working hours.

With your business days and working hours defined, you can create appropriate schedules such as the last business day of the month at 16:00, the second-to-last business day of the month at 9:00, and the first Tuesday after the last business day of the month at 12:00.