Document Scheduled Jobs with Google Calendar

Posted on August 27, 2008 No Comments

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I’ve literally spent years trying to come up with a rational and simple way to document the scheduled jobs that I have running on multiple servers.

My jobs tend not to be anything fancy – in fact, Windows Task Scheduler and the scheduler in SQL Server tend to satisfy my requirements just fine. But lordy, I have a heck of a time keeping track of what jobs are running where. And most importantly: When

I’ve tried spreadsheets. Visio diagrams. Tons of different document and wiki layouts. Nothing ever has made it easy to see it at a glance or keep track.

Oh sure, when I had 3 servers to work with it is was quite simple. I have a lot more now though.

My latest technique just might work though: Google Calendar.

As you see in the image, I’ve created a calendar for each server (hint: the “Create” link at the bottom of the list).

I then replicate each server’s scheduled jobs on its calendar. Frequency, duration and I’ll even add notes to capture what batch file or process is ran. I spent over eight hours going through all my servers today and I’m still not done, but the end is in sight.

Once that’s all done I have a nice visual representation of all my scheduled jobs. I can click on servers in the calendar list to hide/show their jobs. For instance, if I only want to see the jobs going on the servers at data center A, I just toggle all the other servers to hidden.

When all the servers are toggled to “on” I can very quickly find open spots (the few that are left) to schedule new backups or other data intensive jobs. For me, that’s really been the challenge: Making sure I don’t have cross-site backups or syncs going at the same time. I have to hoard my precious bandwidth against all the site-to-site VPN tunnels.

Each server’s wiki page now has a link directly to its specific calendar and my Job Schedule page in the wiki also has all the links collected. They’re all viewable by anyone in my domain, so co-workers can also have all this information readily available if they want or need it.

All in all, I’m pretty happy with this approach. Now if I can just remember to update it when I update jobs I’ll be golden.

Of course, when I have all servers being shown it can be a bit overwhelming:

But, a click on any of those little blocks brings up a little dialog with details so it actually works quite nicely.

Oh, the Agenda View in GCal is pretty good if you want to generate printed or printable documentation.

Tags: calendar, google-calendar, jobs, schedule, sql-server, Tech-Ops, Windows-Task-Scheduler

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