From Avoidable Fees to Decommissioned Servers, it’s Time to Clean Up Your Jobs

Read time: 3 minutes.

Spotify. YouTube TV. Business Insider. Acorns. ESPN+. Disney+. Xbox Live. Google Cloud storage. Amazon Prime. Strava.

What else am I missing? There must be others…

Uh oh…Audible and HBO Max.

When COVID-19 hit, these services seemed like a good idea. I used them for the first few weeks of quarantine and that was it. It wasn’t until October of last year that I realized…

I wasted $209.65 on services I never used.

Keep your opinions to yourself – to me that’s a lot of money!

Subscriptions to these types of services add up – especially when you turn on automatic payments and forget what you’re spending money on. I probably don’t need half the services I’m subscribed to, finding them is never easy, and the process to cancel them is way harder than it should be.

Without access to subscription tracking apps, I would never have gotten the full picture of where my money was going. In a recent article in the Washington Post, Truebill CEO Yahya Mokhtarzada said that the shift to automated payments has made it easier for companies to make money and harder for customers to keep track of where it’s going. “You just have no visibility, and people aren’t exactly anxious to tell you they’re charging you every month,” said Mokhtarzada.

Mokhtarzada’s statement is powerful, and it happens to be my entire motivation for writing this blog

– “you just have no visibility.”

During my time at edgeTI, I’ve realized how true this really is. Everyone, including some of the largest, most recognizable organizations on the planet lack visibility. In many situations, a lack of visibility causes organizations to pay fees for things they are no longer using.

As a key stakeholder in the development of Edge’s Job Scheduling solution, I have seen this firsthand. I’ve found that many of the organizations I work within the Job Scheduling / Workload Automation space are charged based on the number of defined jobs they have running in their environment.

That sounds reasonable, right? Not quite…

Most of the scheduling tools organizations have deployed will tell a user how many jobs they have defined and what servers or agents they are running on.

As vendors charge for the number of jobs an organization has running, the first place an internal user will go is the scheduling tool GUI to ensure that number is correct – if everything matches up, the vendor is paid and it’s back to business. So no…the GUI does not tell you everything!

That is where Edge steps in. At Edge, everything starts with our customers. Like the situation I had with Audible and HBO Max. We helped one of our key customers discover that they were paying for hundreds of thousands of jobs that were no longer running.

With out-of-the-box integrations to scheduling tools like Control-M and AutoSys, Edge eliminates multiple layers of visualization and enriches existing job information with data from disparate, yet related systems. These then allow users to see the full picture.

In one example, a single application had 440k+ defined jobs. Using edgeCore™, the user discovered that 89% of those jobs had not been run in over 3 years – that’s approximately 390k+ jobs!

In our webinar on April 22nd, we will be covering this topic of job decommissioning and how we have completely reimagined the job scheduling experience – for end-users, administrators, and executives alike.