Firefly: Job Monitor

Contents of page/chapter:
+Introduction
+Sending Jobs to the Job Monitor
+The Job Monitor Tab
+Sending Email
+Job Information

Introduction

The Job Monitor exists as a place to manage a variety of processes that might otherwise obstruct your work in the tool -- packaging data, pulling large catalogs, conducting large data product searches, or, in some tools, more sophisticated tools like spectrophotometry calculations. You can place jobs in progress into the job monitor; you can load results from jobs back into the tool, or download data (or scripts for data) from the tool, and you can set it up to email you when the job(s) are done.

Sending Jobs to the Job Monitor

Some jobs are sent to the Job Monitor indepdently of anything you do, but most of the time, you control whether or not you send jobs to the Job Monitor.

If you request a large catalog or a large data download, large enough that it takes more than a few seconds to fulfill your request, you have the option of sending the request to the background -- click on "send to background":

Clicking on the "Job Monitor" button here has the same effect as if you click on the "Job Monitor" blue tab at the top of the screen, and "Cancel" cancels the request.

The Job Monitor Tab

To explore the Job Monitor, click on the Job Monitor tab at the top of the screen:

Here is a reasonably well-populated job monitor list:

At the top, it summarizes (in this case) that there are 7 jobs, one of which is currently active, and none of which have failed. This implementation doesn't have the email entry available.

Below that, there is a table, like any other table in this tool (with all the associated sorting and filtering cabilities), that lists all of the jobs that have been sent to the Job Monitor in this session, along with basic information like what catalog they queried, and what time (in Universal Time) they were launched. Most of them in this screenshot are catalog searches (type = search) but two are data packaging (type = package), one of which is still executing.

On the far right is a collection of icons. The different icons do different things:

	Usually this icon is animated -- the job is executing.
	Display the results of this job in the tool -- usually this appears in reference to a catalog search, and the icon matches that in the "Results" tab, which is where the results will appear after you click on this icon.
	Notification toggled on -- if an email is provided in the top of the Job Monitor, then email will be sent upon completion (see below).
	Notification toggled off -- this is the default state.
	Download the results of this job to your disk -- this could be a zip file, a data file (e.g., a FITS file), or a download script, depending on what data you are accessing.
	Get more information about this job (see below).
	Stop this job.
	Discard this job from this list.

Jobs accumulate in the Job Monitor over a given session, which could include more than one browser window accessing the same archive, because it relies on cookies being set. Jobs that are older than 2 weeks will not appear.

⚠ Tips and Troubleshooting

You control where the file is saved on your disk through your browser; your browser may be configured to store all downloads in a particular location on your disk. Try looking in a "Downloads" directory, or for "recently modified files."

Sending Email

For large jobs (particularly data packaging jobs), in some tools, you have an option to have the system email you when it is done and ready for downloading.

In order to make this happen, the tool has to have this option enabled, and then you have to do two things.

Enter a valid email at the top of the Job Monitor page. (It should go without saying that if you don't enter a correct email, it can't do anything to fix that.)
Tell it that you want it to send you an email for the specific job in question. Click on the blue bell at any time before the job completes to toggle an email being sent to you upon completion.
This means don't send email

This means do send email

The reason it defaults to "don't send email" is so that you avoid spamming yourself - if you make a lot of catalog requests (like 13 in the screenshot above), you most likely don't want it to send you a lot of emails in rapid succession.

If you ask it to email you for a download packaging request, it is fairly likely that you will be emailed links to obtain a curl or wget script, or a list of URLs that you can feed to your own code to get your data. See the download chapter for more details.

⚠ Tips and Troubleshooting

By default, it will NOT send you email when it is complete, even if you have an email filled out. (This is to avoid accidentally spamming yourself!) Click on the blue bell at any time before the job completes to toggle an email being sent to you upon completion.

Job Information

The information you get when you click on the i-in-a-circle

looks something like this:

It specifies things about the query, like when it was submitted and how long it took, but also the job ID (useful for helpdesk tickets), and the parameters you used (which you can copy using the ellipsis, just like for table cells), and also what information you provided -- username if you logged in, email if you provided it, title if you provided it, and the URL that links directly to the job (also useful for helpdesk tickets; to copy it, click on the tiny clipboard icon next to the "jobURL" text).