DataStage via the Web

Cranie · Post by **Cranie** » Mon Nov 08, 2010 9:44 am

Where I work we have two options to dial in Citrix and VPN, the former is the quickest (and can be used on any PC with the software installed). The issue we had, via Citrix is the time it took to start DS client to review a job error. So I dutifully wrote a Web client to replicate some of the functionality of Director:

Login to any instance / port and list projects
Find jobs based on search string
Show locks, by job or all
Show log report / detail instance for log entry

All these use SSH, dsjob and uvsh. I wondered is there a known project out there that does more than the above? Has anyone done anything in house and would consider sharing ideas or maybe evencollaborating further? Just tested on 8.0.1 and all seems to work as expected. Can post screen shots (design is not the best but it does the job).

Should mention the server is a Windows Apache instance, PHP with SSH2 libraries configured.

kduke · Post by **kduke** » Mon Nov 08, 2010 1:56 pm

You might be able to build your own solution. You could execute dsjob thru embedded commands.

Cranie · Post by **Cranie** » Wed Nov 10, 2010 7:04 am

OK, I probably didn't explain so well

I have the following working:

<img src="http://cl.ly/9ebbe4f8b34ee3fcafbe/content" />
<img src="http://cl.ly/8b02a0a9be6028c1dd2f/content" />
<img src="http://cl.ly/3627c1e64248cd19f009/content" />
<img src="http://cl.ly/bed99822432067d20d17/content" />

So more or less meets requirements (there are a couple of options to add like resetting jobs etc, but for a view only app it is working. Just wondered if anyone else had any experience of this / ideas etc?

kduke · Post by **kduke** » Wed Nov 10, 2010 9:53 am

I wrote something called DsWebMon. It did something very similar. I never sold any copies. It was also very difficlut to support new versions of DataStage. Most DataStage developers have VPN access so they use Director.

kduke · Post by **kduke** » Wed Nov 10, 2010 9:57 am

If I was going to do this over I would build a tool for network support team so they would never have to install the DataStage client. It should only show jobs running, just finished or finsihed today. It might need to explain errors better than just displaying the log. Maybe categorize errors into recoverable or not. Which errors are critical?

Cranie · Post by **Cranie** » Wed Nov 10, 2010 10:47 am

We have VPN, but that requires us to use the companies laptops. Citrix is handy as can use anywhere on any machine, also overseas support use it. Director via Citrix can be slow and sometimes not as effective as the real client - like 3 second refresh on large projects / folders with lots of instances is not clever!

The WebDS version above uses SSH, for windows would be easy enough to configure to run the same commands via telnet as they are just dsjob calls. Some calls are to uvsh, but nothing special (could use the other command line versions list_readu etc)

To your last statement I was at IOD2010 and there are some interesting things along these lines coming up. Though the demos were restrictive and some of the functionality I would expect to be available like viewing INFO messages are present.

The next step in my code will be to allow resets of failed jobs as we have some which must be reset manually on fail. As you suggested: jobs currently running (or via time selection - though this is restricted to the 3 days worth of logs we keep) and for the running jobs show the current information. For me this is easy via command line, but operators and others are less proficient in this area :-S

kduke · Post by **kduke** » Wed Nov 10, 2010 1:04 pm

I thought about turning all my tools into shreware and posting the code. DsWebMon was written in Delphi with a friend. So I doubt if I could share it. If you want to go that route then I would be glad in helping add features to it. It is easy to reset a job with the dsjob command. What is this written in? Did you use dsjob or API calls?