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HCL Workload Automation for Z
Welcome to the HCL Workload Automation for Z documentation, where you can find information about how to install, maintain, and use the product.
Scheduling End-to-end with z-centric Capabilities
Defining and managing jobs
Promoting critical jobs
An overview of the mechanism that is behind the promotion of critical jobs, or of their predecessors, running on HCL Workload Automation Agents, including pools and dynamic pools.

HCL Workload Automation for Z
Welcome to the HCL Workload Automation for Z documentation, where you can find information about how to install, maintain, and use the product.
- Program Directory
- Dynamic Workload Console Readmes
  For the latest information about a Dynamic Workload Console fix pack, see the appropriate Readme File.
- Planning and Installation
- Customization and Tuning
- Managing the Workload
  You can plan when and how your workload runs and manage it as part of a plan.
- Scheduling End-to-end with z-centric Capabilities
  - About this publication
  - Configuring
  - Customizing the HTTP connections
    The communication between the HCL Workload Automation Agents and the HCL Workload Automation for Z controller is direct, through the HTTP or HTTPS protocol.
  - Defining user IDs and passwords with the USRREC statement
    Use the USRREC initialization statement to define the passwords for the users who need to schedule jobs to run on Windows™ workstations. You do not need to do this if you run native job types on non-Windows workstations.
  - Defining variables and passwords for local resolution
  - Defining and managing HCL Workload Automation Agent workstations in the database
    After defining the destinations of your HCL Workload Automation Agents, you need to define the HCL Workload Automation Agents as HCL Workload Automation for Z computer automatic workstations.
  - Defining and managing dynamic workstations
    When you add dynamic capabilities to your environment, you can schedule your workload dynamically.
  - Setting the security features
  - Defining and managing jobs
    - Defining jobs from the Dynamic Workload Console
      How to define a new job definition using the Dynamic Workload Console.
    - Defining a job in the JOBLIB data set
      You define the jobs to be run on HCL Workload Automation Agent workstations in a job definition member of the JOBLIB data set. In the JOBLIB member, you can either define the job contents or invoke a script or an executable that is stored locally on the HCL Workload Automation Agent workstation.
    - Using variable substitution
      The variable substitution mechanism that is used in HCL Workload Automation for Z native job types works the same way when scheduling jobs on HCL Workload Automation Agents. The variable substitution mechanism changes when you define job types with advanced options, such as Java™ jobs that run a Java class, or file transfer jobs that transfer files to and from a server, to name a few. These types of jobs are created and edited using the Dynamic Workload Console.
    - Defining file dependencies to check for file changes
    - Checking for file changes with filemonitor
    - Promoting critical jobs
      An overview of the mechanism that is behind the promotion of critical jobs, or of their predecessors, running on HCL Workload Automation Agents, including pools and dynamic pools.
    - Killing operations
  - Administering IBM i dynamic environment
    On overview on how to administer the HCL Workload Automation IBM i dynamic environment.
  - Monitoring and recovering jobs
  - Running a script when a job completes
  - Viewing the job logs from the host
    An overview on how to view or retrieve the job logs issued in the z-centric environment and how to attach a header with job run information on top of each log.
  - Troubleshooting
    Troubleshooting agent problems
  - Configure to schedule job types with advanced options
  - Managing return codes
  - Collecting job metrics
- Quick Reference
- Diagnosis Guide and Reference
- Workload Automation Programming Language for z/OS User's Guide and Reference
- Driving HCL Workload Automation for Z

Promoting critical jobs

An overview of the mechanism that is behind the promotion of critical jobs, or of their predecessors, running on HCL Workload Automation Agents, including pools and dynamic pools.

The promotion of a critical job is the process whereby the execution of a job in the critical path, that is about to miss its deadline, is provided with more resources. Thus, it is redirected to a more powerful or faster dynamic agent, to idle workstations in a pool or dynamic pool, to an agent allocated to the execution of critical work.

As soon as HCL Workload Automation for Z determines that a job flagged as critical is not going to meet its deadline, it automatically updates the definition of the job, and of as many of its predecessors as necessary (that is, all the jobs in the critical path of the critical job), with the tws.job.promoted and tws.job.resourcesForPromoted promotion variables. These variables set the dynamic workload broker component to perform the load balancing required to guarantee that the job is run on time.

If the critical job is to be processed in a dynamic pool, the variables must be added manually to the job definition. For details, see Promoting jobs scheduled on dynamic pools.

To control the priority allocation of system resources to the jobs in the critical network that must be promoted, you must configure the PromotedNice or PromotedPriority property of the native job launcher section in the JobManager.ini file of your HCL Workload Automation Agents.

When a native job is promoted, the TWS_PROMOTED_JOB environment variable is automatically added with value set to YES in the job definition. You can possibly take advantage of the value (YES or NO) of this variable in the script/program run by the native job, to implement a prioritization mechanism.