Skip to Main Content
Cloud Management and AIOps


This is an IBM Automation portal for Cloud Management and AIOps products. To view all of your ideas submitted to IBM, create and manage groups of Ideas, or create an idea explicitly set to be either visible by all (public) or visible only to you and IBM (private), use the IBM Unified Ideas Portal (https://ideas.ibm.com).

Shape the future of IBM!

We invite you to shape the future of IBM, including product roadmaps, by submitting ideas that matter to you the most. Here's how it works:

Search existing ideas

Start by searching and reviewing ideas and requests to enhance a product or service. Take a look at ideas others have posted, and add a comment, vote, or subscribe to updates on them if they matter to you. If you can't find what you are looking for,

Post your ideas
  1. Post an idea.

  2. Get feedback from the IBM team and other customers to refine your idea.

  3. Follow the idea through the IBM Ideas process.

Specific links you will want to bookmark for future use

Welcome to the IBM Ideas Portal (https://www.ibm.com/ideas) - Use this site to find out additional information and details about the IBM Ideas process and statuses.

IBM Unified Ideas Portal (https://ideas.ibm.com) - Use this site to view all of your ideas, create new ideas for any IBM product, or search for ideas across all of IBM.

ideasibm@us.ibm.com - Use this email to suggest enhancements to the Ideas process or request help from IBM for submitting your Ideas.

Status Not under consideration
Created by Guest
Created on Sep 13, 2017

Kill Zombie Jobs: Add functionality to be able to recover from a corrupted Jobtable on an FTA

When an FTA crashes and gets a corrupted Jobtable and the Jobtable must be removed, jobs that were in EXEC status before the crash remain in EXEC state and take run slots against the server limit, and job stream limit if applicable, even after the jobs are cancelled. There is no way to release the run slot, and the limits need to be raised to accommodate the zombie jobs. This leads to the server limit being higher than desired in the next plan.

There are a couple ways I could see to add functionality that would allow for recovery from a corrupted Jobtable on an FTA:

1: add a new status of "UNKNOWN" that the FTA can set the jobs to after it discovers that the jobs are in EXEC but have no record in the Jobtable. This UNKNOWN status should function similarly to ABEND wherin the job could be rerun, cancelled, or confirmed, but should not trigger automatic abend recovery options. Jobs in UNKNOWN should hold a run slot until the job is rerun, cancelled, or confirmed.

2: add a user interface option to move the job internal status out of EXEC. This could be a command line tool on the master or FTA that sends the same message that would have been sent by the FTA on which the job runs upon completion of the process. In essence it would be like "conman confirm" but forcing the internal status out of EXEC, not putting the job into SUCCP or ABENP. Perhaps it could be implemented with "conman confirm [jobselect];{succ | abend};forced"? A similar functionality could be also added to the DWC.

While "confirm ... ;forced" seems like it might be easier to implement, it could also be inappropriately applied to jobs that are not zombie jobs and would break the ability to kill the underlying process in that misuse case. The UNKNOWN status more directly fits as a solution to actual issue of zombie jobs.

Idea priority Urgent
RFE ID 110284
RFE URL
RFE Product IBM Workload Scheduler (IWS)
  • Guest
    Reply
    |
    Nov 17, 2022

    The requirement is acceptable, but the scenario occurs rarely, and we have enhancement with higher priority to implement in the next year

    For this reason, we are closing it

  • Guest
    Reply
    |
    Nov 6, 2019

    Due to processing by IBM, this request was reassigned to have the following updated attributes:
    Brand - Cloud
    Product family - Workload Automation and Control Desk
    Product - IBM Workload Scheduler (IWS)

    For recording keeping, the previous attributes were:
    Brand - WebSphere
    Product family - ITSM Automation and Control Desk
    Product - IBM Workload Scheduler (IWS)