Task

Description

Scheduling background jobs

Before the actual background processing can start, you must first define and schedule the background jobs. For information about the jobs scheduling transaction SM36 and other types of job scheduling, see Job Scheduling.

There are a range of background jobs that must run regularly in a production system, to, for example, delete obsolete jobs or spool objects. For information about this, see the section Background Jobs to Be Scheduled Regularly.

Administering background jobs

The Job Overview (transaction SM37) allows you to administer jobs and is the central area for performing various job monitoring and job administration tasks. These include, for example, repeating, canceling, and deleting jobs. For more information on the job overview, see Managing Jobs from the Job Overview.

Monitoring background jobs

You should regularly check whether the jobs are executed.

You can monitor jobs in the following ways:

·        You can call the Job Selection transaction (transaction SM37) and check whether the jobs actually ran without errors.

·        You can use the job monitoring of the Alert Monitor (transaction RZ20) to monitor the jobs. You can set up job monitoring so that you are automatically notified if a job terminated or a runtime error occurred.

With job monitoring, alerts are displayed if one of these errors occurred. If you assign an “auto-reaction method” to these alerts, you are notified, for example, by SMS or by e-mail if problems occurred during the execution of the jobs.

For information about how to set up job monitoring, see the section Monitoring Jobs with the Alert Monitor.

Troubleshooting

If errors occurred, you need to perform a Problem Analysis and start Troubleshooting. When troubleshooting, it is often advisable to first check in the work process overview (transactions SM50 and SM66) whether the background work processes are still running.