Recommendations for customized reconciliation job

After you perform a few recommended actions, you can create a customized reconciliation job. We recommend that you adhere to the following guidelines when creating a custom reconciliation job.

Identify and merge activities 

• If you plan to include Identify and Merge activities in a job, create a standard job with the automated defaults. You can also create a custom identify and merge activity, and a precedence rule. Using these precedence rules you can create a custom job. 
• For a large amount of data, such as an initial load, run separate identify and merge jobs to allow for better diagnostics.
• For incremental updates, run identify and merge activities in one job. For new CIs, the identify and merge activities may take more time to run. For modified CIs, the identify activity runs quickly because the CIs have reconciliation IDs.
• In a reconciliation job, the Identify and Merge activities are run sequentially, based on the Sequence ID given in the reconciliation job which means that the instances start merging into the target data set only after all instances are identified. For a large amount of data, you can create separate identify and merge jobs and configure the merge job to run in a continuous mode. When the continuous merge job runs at the specified interval, all identified instances with the  ReconciliationMergeStatus attribute set to Ready to Merge are merged into the target data set. This configuration ensures that identified instances can begin merging into the target data set while the Identify activity is still running on the remaining unidentified instances.

Multiple jobs (or Simultaneous jobs)

• Create small jobs, containing the fewest number of activities that must always run together in a given order to provide the flexibility of subsequently reusing the jobs with more activities. 
• Do not create jobs that simultaneously identify the same data set or merge data into the same target data set. Simultaneous reconciliation can either overwrite data you wanted to keep from the other job or create duplicate CI instances.
• If you need to create multiple jobs to merge data into the same production data set, you can select Multiple data sets as a source data set in Merge activity. 
• To run the job sequentially or set the jobs as continuous and run them in parallel with the View Other Datasets for Parallel Continuous Jobs option selected. You can configure this option from the new Dashboard, select Configurations > Core Configurations page, and click the Reconciliation component in the left pane. -
• Do not run more than one BMC Atrium Integrator, Normalization Engine, and Reconciliation Engine jobs at the same time because they might query or update the same data.

To create a custom reconciliation job

1. From CMDB Portal, select Jobs > Manage Reconciliation.
2. Click Create Job and enter a job name.

3. Select the appropriate settings for the job.
   To view the details of every setting, hover the cursor over each setting.

4. To use custom rules for Identify and Merge activities, clear the Use Standard Rules for Dataset check box.

5. To add an Identify activity, click Add activity > Identify and perform the following steps:
   

    Steps to add Identify activity

   1. (Optional) Specify a name for the activity and configure the following parameters:

      • Namespace

      • Sequence

      • Status

      • Continue on Error

   2. Select Source and Production datasets from the lists.

   3. In Selected Dataset, click the Standard Rules icon to use an identification rule.
      

   4. (Optional) Set the preferences for the following options:
      • Generate IDs
      • Exclude Sub-classes
   5. (Optional) In Qualification, add a qualification set to select which classes and instances to include in the identification activity. 

      1. Clear the Use all classes and instances check box to restrict the Identify activity by using a qualification set.

      2. Click Select qualification ruleset to select a qualification set.

6. To add a Merge activity, click Add activity > Merge and perform the following steps:
   

    Steps to add Merge activity

   1. (Optional) Specify a name for the activity and configure the following parameters:

      • Namespace

      • Sequence

      • Status

      • Continue on Error

   2. Select Source and Target datasets from the lists.

      Important

      You can select multiple datasets as a source dataset in the Merge activity instead of creating multiple jobs to merge data into the same production dataset.

      
      

   3. In Selected Dataset, click the Standard Rules icon to view and add the standard merge precedence rule for the selected dataset.
      
   4. Select a Precedence association set for the datasets selected for this activity.
      In a standard reconciliation job, BMC Default Precedence set is selected by default and cannot be changed.
      To change the values in the precedence association set, see Creating precedence sets and associations for reconciliation merge activities.

   5. Set Merge Order based on your requirements:

      Merge order	Description
      By Class in separate transactions	The CIs are merged one class at a time. Only after the CIs in a class are merged, the CIs from the next class are merged. Tip: Use this option to keep the reconciliation performance high.
      Related CIs in one transaction	All CIs are merged at the same time.
      Related CIs in separate transactions	Only the CIs that belong in a hierarchy are merged at a time.

   6. (Optional) Select Include Unchanged CIs.

7. To add Purge activity, click Add Activity > Purge and perform the following steps:

    Steps to add Purge activity

   1. (Optional) Specify a name for the activity and configure the following parameters:

      • Namespace

      • Sequence

      • Status

      • Continue on Error

   2. Select Source dataset from the list.

   3. (Optional) In Qualification, add a qualification set to select the classes and instances to be purged. 

      1. Clear the Use all classes and instances checkbox to restrict the Purge activity by using a qualification set.

      2. Click Select qualification ruleset to select a qualification set.

   4. In Purge Instances, select the desired option:
      • Identified and unidentified - Both identified and unidentified instances are purged.
      • Identified - Only identified instances are purged.
      • Unidentified - Only unidentified instances are purged.
   5. (Optional) To verify the instances that are marked as deleted in the target dataset, select Verify Soft Deleted in Target Dataset.
      
8. (Optional) Select a schedule for the job run frequency.
9. Click Save.
10. (Optional) To run the job immediately, open the job from All Job Run Activities and click Start Job.