General question about information a scheduler 'dashboard' should have

Question

Sorry for another non programming question, but I'm using Quartz.NET, a scheduler for .NET applications, for a Windows Service which allows users to schedule transferrig of files that match a regular expression from various sources - for example the user may schedule a job to occur every day at 6pm that transfers the files from a network path to a FTP server.

The adding jobs and management is done using an ASP.NET project, and I'm creating a Dashboard to display useful info to the user. I have the following information on the dashboard so far:

Total number of jobs
Windows Service status
Time since scheduler active

I know it's a very general question, but what other snippets of info can I add to the dashboard, as it's very sparse at the moment.

Answer 1

I've worked as a product manager on a few schedulers. Here are some common requirements for these types of things, but I urge you to talk to some target users to find out if they are applicable to your application.

The use cases: 1. Trying to identify if the jobs are running okay. 2. If jobs are not running okay, give the user clues as to the cause. Give user tools to debug and fix.

General requirements: 1. Table with info on last N jobs: - Time started, time completed. Status of completion (success / failure). Length of time. Any errors. User who scheduled job. Any dependencies this job has on other jobs or other events. Specific machine the job ran on (if in a cluster).

Might be nice to include links in this dashlet that would allow you to cancel a job that might be hung. Priority of the job (if you have priorities).

1. Compare all jobs: %succeed, %failure. Avg time to complete job.

2. Compare jobs by the scheduling user: avg time, %success, %failure.

This is by no means a comprehensive list or something. Just my trying to give you a few ideas, based on what I can remember off the top of my head.

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