JobQGenie has been around for a number of years. Originally written for a customer who had major issues with recovery after a system failure, it had changed little in how it collected the information required for recovery purposes. That all changed when a new customer started to run it in his very complex environment, we found that the collection process started to trip over itself as it tried to keep up with the amount of data is was having to collect. The customer readily admits his environment is a challenge for many of the products he runs, JobQGenie was just another one!
We had to look at ways of removing the timing issues without significantly changing the products capabilities. This resulted in a total rewrite of the collection and monitoring engine which in turn meant we had to rewrite all of the interfaces, not a small task. After some initial testing we found a few issues and resolved them with lots of help from the customer, eventually they decided the product was stable enough and moved it into a production environment.
We had to fine tune a few things but now it seems to be running OK… We found a small issue where the system puts some incorrect data into some display variables that is more annoying than anything else, the reason for the strange data is not clear so we are working on finding a solution for it. One thing we did feel was worth sharing though is the following quote “XXXXXXXXXX appears to cycle through the 6 digit job numbers about every week or two. If JQG can track all that without skipping a beat, I think we can put up with a few odd symbols”. Not that putting up with a few odd symbols is acceptable, but cycling through the job numbers every week or so shows just how much work JQG is having to do and as they say doesn’t skip a beat! That is certainly a big step forward for JQG when I look back at some of the initial data capture technology we used and how much data was missed..
While JobQGenie may not be as widely used as it should be, having a customer show us how well the product can perform gives us a lot of pride in what we have achieved! Perhaps now the product will get the attention it deserves and we will see more people using the product (which by the way is the only product on the market that provides these capabilities).
Chris…