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As outlined in the previous blogs about Job Interception: Controlling end-user scheduled jobs and Re-directing transactions SM36, SM37, SA38: Controlling end-user scheduled jobs – Part 1, one major challenge for customers is the control over end-user scheduled jobs that undermine any central scheduling effort. Now several customers came up with the question how they can check if and if yes, how many background jobs are actually scheduled by end-users and bypass their respective central scheduling tool like SAP Central Process Scheduling by Redwood or their respective IBM or BMC et.al. tool.

This check can be performed rather easily if you know how external scheduling tools work. In general every external scheduler uses the BC-XBP interface provided in SAP_BASIS in order to schedule background jobs in the SAP backend system. As soon as the central scheduling tool decides to schedule a job in the backend system then this job is triggered immediately in the SAP system, i.e. if you look into transaction SM37 you will hardly see any externally scheduled job in status "Scheduled", "Released" or "Ready" but only in status "Active", "Finished" or Cancelled". The first three steps are performed all "at once".

On the contrary, background jobs which are periodically scheduled within the SAP system via SM36, SA38 or directly out of an application are most of the time in status "Released", because as soon as one job execution finished a new job instance with the same name is created and put in status "Released".

With this knowledge at hand it is pretty easy to get an idea about which jobs are directly scheduled in the backend system and bypassing your central scheduling tool.

Call transaction SM37, select a time frame in the (near) future and select only status "Released". Then switch to the Extended job selection.



On the Extended job selection you go to tab strip Period and select Only periodic jobs. Execute the selection.



You get to see the list of all periodic jobs in status "Released". These are all good candidates which should be

  • 1) Discontinued

  • 2) Comprehensively and centrally documented (preferably in SAP Solution Manager)

  • 3) Scheduled anew with your central scheduling tool




From this list you can double-click on one job an get the information how frequently this job is scheduled.



As an alternative to transaction SM37 you can directly access table TBTCO (via transaction SE16) and select all jobs with PERIODIC = ‘X' and STATUS = ‘S'. The advantage here is that you can see on one view which periodic frequency is defined for the one job or the other.

 

Related previous blogs: