Helix Control-M Automation API Home

Introduction

Helix Control-M simplifies application workflow orchestration. Helix Control-M makes it easy to define, schedule, manage, and monitor workflows, ensuring visibility and reliability, and improving SLAs, enabling you to focus on your core business.

With Helix Control-M you:

• Streamline the orchestration of business applications—delivering better apps faster—by embedding workflow orchestration into your CI/CD pipeline.
• Extend Dev and Ops collaboration with a Jobs-as-Code approach.
• Simplify workflows across hybrid and multi-cloud environments with AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform integrations.
• Deliver data-driven outcomes faster, managing big data workflows in a scalable way.
• Take control of your file transfer operations with intelligent file movement and enhanced visibility.

Helix Control-M Automation API is a set of programmatic interfaces that provide developers and DevOps engineers access to the capabilities of Helix Control-M within the modern application release process. Job flows and related configuration objects are built in JSON and managed together with other application artifacts in any source code management solution, such as GIT.  This approach enables capabilities such as sophisticated scheduling, flow control, and SLA management to be built in right from inception and used during the running of batch applications as they are automatically deployed in dev, test, and production environments.

Helix Control-M Automation API provides an automated interface to Helix Control-M in addition to the Web user interfaces. With Helix Control-M Automation API, you manage job workflows as code, similar to the way modern configuration management solutions manage infrastructure as code. The actual execution of batch jobs is managed by Helix Control-M. 

You can use a Command Line Interface or the REST API to build, deploy, run, and manage jobs. Once your flows are ready, you can check them into your source control system with the rest of your project files. The Automation API provides services to package and deploy job flows to the Helix Control-M environment. Helix Control-M schedules and operates on the most recently deployed flows.

Additionally, Helix Control-M Automation API provides services to provision agents on prem or in the cloud, configure host groups, and more.

No prior experience with Helix Control-M is required to write jobs. Work through this Guide and its tutorials to get started. The guide introduces you to the concepts of Helix Control-M Automation API with some examples of flows. You can get more information about creating jobs by following the steps from the tutorial of Creating your first job flow. You can find more information about accessing Helix Control-M Automation API services to build, test, and deploy your jobs in Setting up the API.

Control-M in a nutshell

In order to make use of Helix Control-M Automation API effectively, you must be familiar with the following Control-M concepts:

• Jobs
• Folders
• Scheduling
• Agent
• Host groups
• Site standards

A Job is a basic execution unit of Control-M. A job has several attributes, such as:

• What is the job type: script, command, Hadoop/Spark, file transfer, etc. 
• Where does this job run: host
• Who runs the job: connection profile or run as
• When should it run: scheduling criteria
• What are the job dependencies: a specific job must complete, a file must arrive, etc.

Jobs are contained in folders, which can also have scheduling criteria, dependencies, and other instructions that apply to all jobs in the folder. You define these entities in JSON format. 

The Control-M engine reads the job definitions once a day and starts monitoring all jobs scheduled to start on that day. These are then submitted to run on agents when scheduling criteria and dependencies are met.

Agents reside on the application hosts. You can group them into a host group. Specifying a job to run on a host group causes Helix Control-M to balance the load by directing jobs to the various hosts in the host group.

Site Standards are a set of naming rules for the different job fields. When using them, only jobs that match the relevant site standard can be built and deployed to that Helix Control-M.

For more information about Control-M solutions, refer to the Helix Control-M Online Help .

When using the Helix Control-M Automation API, you access Helix Control-M via a REST API HTTP endpoint. In addition to the option of sending REST API requests, you can also run the Helix Control-M Automation API commands via a command line interface (CLI) . For setup information, see Setting up the API.

Tutorials

To get you started, BMC provides you with a group of tutorials to introduce you to common best practices of using Helix Control-M Automation API. See Tutorials.