Jobs For Supporting Data Analysis

Informer 5 Job Feature

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could email one filtered data view to a coworker and a different filtered view to another, save a data view to your file system, or even FTP it? And, do this all on a schedule! Well, Informer 5 Jobs enables you to do just that.

An Informer Job is a task or collection of tasks to be executed against data in your system. These tasks can be automated using a recurrence schedule, or simply saved in the system to be manually triggered when needed. The three main components of creating a Job are:

Identifying the data that the Job is going to be using
Selecting the actions that the Job will be executing based off the data
and, scheduling the Job

Jobs are tightly governed, and the individual or Team that creates a Job owns that particular Job and only certain roles are allowed to manage those Jobs.

Setting Up The Data

After you define the data to use from one or more Informer Dataset(s) or Ad hoc Queries, select whether you want the data to refresh for your data analysis whenever the Job is run.

For example, you can bring in the Dataset that contains all your organization’s sales across the country and then filter the Dataset per geographical region, resulting in four data components – Northern Sales, Southern Sales, Eastern Sales, and Western Sales. See Figure 1.

Setting Up The Actions

Define the set of tasks you would like executed against the data. For example, perhaps you would like to send an email to the Director of Sales – Northern Division with Visuals from the filtered Dataset Northern Sales, and send similar emails to the South, East, and West Directors of Sales. And, then store the filtered data components to the file system to perform data analysis. This can all be accomplished within the same Job. See Figure 2.

There are four options for Actions on a job and custom Actions specific to your organization can be easily introduced via a plugin:

Send an email – Use a rich email editor to send an email using content sourced from the Data components of the Job. You can also add file attachments to the email. For example: a new HTML file, text file, zip file, a file from the file system, or the Data components of the Job in a certain file format.
Send an email burst – Use a rich email editor to send emails to different individuals using specific content per email sourced from the Data components of the Job. You can also attach files to burst emails.
Send to file system – Save files to the file system of your Informer instance. Choose the files to send. For example: an HTML file, text file, zip file, upload files, or send from the Data components of the Job.
Send to FTP – Establish and send files via an FTP connection. Choose the files to send. For example: an HTML file, text file, zip file, upload files, or send from the Data components of the Job.

All the Actions above can be selected to ‘Run on a Condition’, where the Action is only run if there is a configurable threshold number of records in the data components.

Setting Up The Schedule

A Job can be run on a defined schedule or manually at any time. See Figure 3.

Informer provides tremendous flexibility in setting the interval of the schedule:

Minutes – You can designate a job to run every X minutes, starting at a designated date and time. For example: Run every 5 minutes.
Hourly – You can designate a job to run every X hours, starting at a designated date and time. For example: Run every 6 hours.
Daily – You can designate a job to run either every X day at a designated time or to run every weekday at a designated time. For example: Run every third day.

Weekly – You can designate a job to run on specific days of the week at a designated time. For example: Run every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
Monthly – You can designate a job to run on a specific date of a specific month or to run on the first/second/third/fourth occurrence of a given day of the week every X months. For example: Run on the third Wednesday of every second month.
Yearly – You can designate a job to run once a year on a specific date of a specific month or to run on the first/second/third/fourth occurrence of a given day of the week for a specific month.
Custom – You can also specify a cron expression for very granular recurrence schedules that are not covered above.

Jobs List Page & History of Jobs

All Jobs are listed on the Jobs List Page where you can see a snapshot of the Job by status. Details show the Owner, the Schedule for the Job, last run time, the next run time, status of the Job, when it was created, when it was last modified, and more. The History page lists all the recent fire times of the Job, who ran the Job, the duration of the Job, and the result of the Job, i.e., success, failed, or warning. See Figure 4.