Best practices for promotion across different environments

[oscilatorium]

Hi,

I am new to ControlM (Just took a scheduling class recently). I am wondering what are some good methods to migrate and promote ControlM schedules across multiple environments (in my case we have Dev, QA, and Prod servers).

As an example, let's say I create a schedule A (containing a scheduling group and multiple jobs) that runs in the dev environment. My plan is to parametrize any environment specific job values (e.g. directory paths, server names/ids) by using auto-edit variables at either the scheduling group level, or possibly the global variable level.

My question is where is it recommended to define the environment specific values for the variables ? (I.e. should i put them in the values tab within the scheduling group definition, or should they be held in an external Unix file, and imported into Control M each time the schedule is run ? )

Also, if i then want to make a QA, and a Prod schedule, how should i approach it, given that I have my Dev schedule set up, and given that all dependencies, jobs, etc. are the same in QA and Prod. Would I just make a copy of the Dev version and change the value of the Scheduling table to point to a new QA and Prod ? (I assume i could do this by using the commandline utilities).

Any help would be appreciated,

-Cezar