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IT managers, does this sound familiar? Just when everything is running smoothly, you encounter the release management process in place for upgrading business applications in the production environment. You get an error notification in one of the workflows running the release management process.  It can be especially frustrating when the error is coming from the very same workflow that has been successfully running every day!

You face challenges every day to have an up-to-date production environment to work with. It’s no fun when you need to narrow down the problem from lists of scheduling changes and possible actors—and trying to understand why on earth they made a change in the first place! Why can’t you see the history of changes, the differences between the versions, and the possibility to roll back to the working version, plain and simple?

Before you start pointing fingers at potential culprits, consider turning to IBM Workload Scheduler V9.4’s new auditing capability.

The auditing capability will tell you not only who made the change, but also why the change was made. And after you’ve detected the who, why, and when, you can open a comparison viewer and quickly identify the what. Compare the latest version with the previous version and revert back to it using the restore feature. So you finally have a working environment back up and running: now just push those changes right through to the production environment seamlessly.

To meet release management and auditing requirements, Workload Scheduler applies version control to the scheduling objects comprising your business application. All versions of your scheduling objects are maintained in the database and you can easily access them from the Dynamic Workload Console.

Watch this video to see this in action. You’ll see a workflow that has always run smoothly suddenly fail, and how quick and easy it becomes to detect the change that introduced the problem and implement the solution—all without stopping scheduling activities.

When pushing a change into production environment, you need a release management process that is simple and reliable. Now you can automate and schedule the development, testing and promotion into production of an application or business process, and keep track of different versions. You always have the option to roll back to a previous version should something go wrong. Watch this video to see how release management becomes part of the core automation and you can easily promote changes through a complete release lifecycle:

When multiple schedulers, operators, and administrators have access to the same scheduling objects, keeping track of changes and the capability to extract detailed reports become a must to ensure continuity in your scheduling environment. Workload Scheduler V9.4 provides comprehensive and customizable auditing, enabling organizations to track, store and report on the details of scheduling changes. Administrators set the auditing levels and preferences for their environments: they can optionally enforce a policy by which each user making a change to an object must provide a justification for the change.

Watch this video to see how you can maintain an audit trail and stay in control of your environment:

Workload Scheduler’s auditing capability can also integrate with external applications. The opening of an incident in ServiceNow can be triggered following an event such as a failed process, an unavailable workstation, or any custom event. Then, you can track the entire lifecycle of the incident from the Dynamic Workload Console.

Don’t miss out on the new V9.4 release that empowers you to deliver value to your customers rapidly, reliably, and efficiently. Check out these great features and much, much more here.

This post was co-authored by Marina Fabbri, Giulia Farinelli and Louisa Ientile.

The post How to streamline continuous delivery through better auditing appeared first on IBM Systems Blog: In the Making.