What is Cron?
Cron is a job scheduler for UNIX and UNIX-like operating systems. Cron automates system maintenance and schedules tasks to run at fixed times, like certain days of the week or month. The Crontab file 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 script-driven and relies 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. This results in higher costs, missed SLAs, overwhelming notifications, operational bottlenecks, and additional system downtime. This reliance on scripts 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 by using calendars, time zones, custom tags, and more. Users can also schedule workflows based on a specific business day.
ActiveBatch's Integrated Cron Jobs Library provides hundreds of prebuilt job actions that make it easy to develop reliable, cross-platform workflows. This means ActiveBatch can easily kick off Cron job runs without a tutorial or heavy configuration. Plus, it can all be completed without any custom php 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 web applications, users can build and automate complex workflows from a central coordination point. ActiveBatch also enables organizations to connect to applications with API endpoints and can perform command line functions.
Integrate Virtually Any Solution or Operating System 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 API 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 Cron Job Automation and Orchestration Capabilities
- Provide data for various metrics in real-time
- Protect existing script investments through lifecycle management capabilities
- Manage the provisioning of on-premise and cloud infrastructure resources
- Use built-in load balancing functionality to reduce wait times
- Provide alerting. Each notification 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.