 Welcome to the Control-M Using Priority and Critical Job Parameters video. In this video, you will learn about the Priority and Critical Job Parameters and how these parameters can help you control the submission order of jobs and reserve or hold resources for critical jobs. Before viewing this video, we recommend that you view our videos about control and quantitative resources. First, we'll talk about using the Priority Parameter. The Priority Parameter is helpful when you have a shortage of resources or a limited amount of resources, and you want more important jobs to run first during the same general timeframe as the jobs that are less important, for example, during the day. You can control the order in which jobs are submitted and also control a job's access to a quantitative resource or an exclusive control resource by using the Priority Parameter to assign a priority level. Let's look at an example that shows how a quantitative resource can be reserved for urgent jobs using priority levels. In this example, we have four jobs that all run on the same machine. This machine has one gigabyte of memory, and each job uses one gigabyte of memory. Therefore, only one job can run on the machine at one time. A quantitative resource was created for the machine's memory with a quantity of one, and all four jobs have one quantity of the resource. In this example, the ATM job is the most urgent job. So to make sure this job runs first, you would select the highest priority level for this job. The payroll job is the second most urgent job, so you would select the next priority level for this job. The other two jobs are not urgent. It doesn't matter which one runs next, so you wouldn't select a priority level for them. Let's look at how you select priority levels for jobs and how the jobs in this example will run in Control-M. Here are the jobs from the example. Let's assign priority levels to the ATM and payroll jobs. The priority parameter is located in the general tab of the job parameters at the bottom of the pane. In the drop-down list, there are five priority levels that you can assign to a job, from very high to very low. If you need more than five levels of priority for your jobs, you can use a range of letters and numbers. See the Control-M help for more information. For the ATM job, we'll select very high. And for the payroll job, we'll select the next level, high. The remaining two jobs don't get any priority, and we see that all the jobs use the quantitative resource for the memory. Let's order the jobs. We see that the ATM job runs first, followed by the payroll job, and the remaining jobs run in a random order. A few things to note about how priority levels work. A job's priority level is taken into account or recognized, only when the job's prerequisites are satisfied and it is within its scheduled timeframe. Meaning, if a job uses more than one resource, and one of the resources is not available, a job with a lower priority whose resources are available will run first. If you want to make sure that the high priority job does run first, you can select the critical checkbox which we'll learn about shortly. If a job has inconditions and these conditions are not met, or a job is not yet within its scheduled timeframe, a job with a lower priority may run first. Now let's talk about the critical parameter. When you select the critical checkbox for a job, the job gets preferential treatment in the allocation of resources, meaning that ControlM reserves or holds the resources for the job as they become available, even when other jobs are also waiting for the resource. When all of the jobs inconditions are met, the job is submitted. Let's look at an example where we have five jobs, two jobs with dependencies, and three jobs without dependencies. All the jobs use the same quantitative resource, and the maximum amount of the resource is four. The jobs use different amounts of the resource. Jobs one and two both use two units of the resource, and the remaining jobs use either three or four units of the resource. Job two will be our critical job. Because job two is critical and has a dependency on job one, job one will run first. And while job one is running, two units of the resource are being reserved for job two. This means that all units of the resource, four, are being used so that the other jobs have to wait until job two has completed before they can run. Let's look at how you mark a job as critical and how the jobs in this example will run and control them. In our example, job two is critical, so in the general tab of the job properties, in the priority area at the bottom of the pane, we'll select the critical checkbox. The quantitative resources have already been selected for these jobs, and are the same as in the example we just talked about. The amount of units is indicated in the job name. Let's order the jobs and see what happens. We see that job one runs first because job two is dependent on job one, and then job two runs. The other jobs run in a random order. You can use the priority and critical job parameters together to further prioritize critical jobs. The order of precedence when using these two parameters together is as follows. The highest priority you can set is very high with critical. Next is high with critical, followed by high without critical, and so forth. Selecting the critical checkbox always increases the priority level. Let's look at how jobs will run and control them when using the critical and priority parameters together. We'll use the same set of jobs that we used for the critical parameter example. This time, job four has the critical parameter selected, and its priority is very high. Job five also has critical selected, and its priority is medium. And job two has critical selected with no priority level selected. Let's order the jobs. We see that job four runs first, job five second, next job one to satisfy the incondition for job two, then job two, and last job three. Thanks for watching this video.