Share This Article
Ever have cron fail? Did it cause your disk to fill up because your logs didn’t rotate? Or maybe like us today, you had a cron job to execute on some metrics. And, it failed. So, no metrics, no business reporting, no analyzing our data. That’s the game of chicken you play with cron. It’s been a great utility for over four decades, but just about every IT person out there has been burned by it. Cron has caused a box to crash, downtime, or delays in getting data out the door. Doesn’t it happen at the most inconvenient times? Why do we still put up with these failures?
Chronic Cron Problems, Be Gone!
It’s a good thing for us that we just released our command execution functionality. No more cron jobs. We’ll schedule each task or group of tasks using JumpCloud. Tasks can be commands or scripts. They can frankly be a group of scripts or tasks for that matter (best of all – use whatever language you like – bash, perl, python, Ruby, Go, etc.)! Think of them as cross-platform GPOs. After you figure out the tasks that you want to automate, you can easily schedule using our UI scheduler. Then choose what devices (Linux, Mac, or Windows) you want to execute those tasks on using a tag or group of tags (tags are our way of creating a group of devices). Choose who you want to run the task as and you are good to go.
JumpCloud executes the task and you’ll get full reporting and logging on what happened. If there is an error, you’ll know about it. How’s that for visibility? No more downtime because the disk filled up with log files. And no more missing data because the processing job didn’t run. You’ll know if there are problems and can address them quickly. At least for our company, that should be the last cron problem we experience. How about you? Are you ready to end issues related to cron? Give JumpCloud a try. It’s about 5 minutes from the time you sign-up to the time you are in the UI automating tasks. And, beyond a GPO alternative, you’ll be able to centralizing your user management with our core Directory-as-a-Service® functionality. Let us know what you think.
