ESP - Scheduling across Time Zones

[SAL COSTANZO]

Currently our MASTER (Mainframe) is in EST – this is our LOCAL time zone. 

We are going to begin scheduling servers in other time zones,  ie: MST    (2 hour difference)

 

The actual scheduling of work across time zones seems to be easy to do with ESP, but looking for hints/tips to keep TIMES straight – it  appears this could cause a lot of confusion.

 

How are people handling the scheduling of work across different timezones and keeping track of times?

Any tricks to make it easier to keep things straight?

You schedule with TIMEZONE parms, but all displays are LOCAL.

When jobs run around midnight, DATES will be different between the 2 zones – any tricks to keeping this straight?

If you need to look at logs on the servers in different time zones or have conversations with the customers in the different time zones about their scheduled work – have you discovered an easy way to keep things straight?

 

Here is what we see so far.

 

An EVENT was  scheduled like this: (with a non-LOCAL timezone, MST)

EVENT ID(SPSCCHA.CCCTST16)  OWNER(ESP)  SYSTEM(SYSF)  REPLACE

SCHEDULE 05.20 MST DAILY STARTING 30th JAN 2018         

INVOKE 'PP1.ESP.ESPPROC.AUTO.TEST(CCCTST16)'                

 

On the Mainframe LIST EVENTS screen, it looked like this  (displays LOCAL time):

EVENT                                   NEXT DUE AT                     LAST RUN            SYS      HC  SC

SPSCCHA.CCCTST16          07.20.00 2018/01/30    unknown               SYSF     0   0 

 

When it RAN, WA Workstation indicated the local time it ran.

   OPRTEST5 J6819, COMPLETED, CC 0,  AT 07.20 ON TUESDAY JANUARY 30TH,

 

Should there be a field that displays TIMEZONE the job was run in? Would this be of benefit to request?

Maybe TIMEZONE should be included in other places/logs/displays??

Maybe there are already some PARMS that we can turn on to also display 'scheduled time zone' times?

 

Any help/hints/tips/gotchas would be appreciated.

 

Thanks

Sal

[Lucy Zhang]

Hi Sal,

 

Currently there is no parm to show the timezone in the places you mentioned.

 

I suggest that you post an idea for possible enhancement.

 

Thank you,

 

Lucy

[SAL COSTANZO]

Lucy,

 

Until I get a better understanding on how this is going to work  (and hopefully get some feedback from customers already using cross time zones) I am not sure I know what to ask for.  Right now I can see the benefits, depending on the scenario, where LOCAL time displays are better and when 'remote' times are.  Maybe it's best to display both time formats, but some of the screens/fields may not have room for that? Since I do not do the scheduling, schedulers may have a completely different opinion since they will be dealing with it all day long.

 

Appreciate the suggestion - but I am on hold with this for the moment while I gather more information.

 

Thanks

Sal