US Patent 7386586 System for scheduling and monitoring computer processes

A job scheduling device providing a consistent set of application programming interfaces (APIs) compiled and linked into an individual or suite of programs to provide scheduling services on a single computer or across multiple computing platforms, includes a GUI API for retrieving and validated job parameters, a job scheduling API for allocating jobs based on the job parameters, and an enterprise scheduling agent hosted on one or more nodes of the computer platforms. An enterprise communication agent sends messages containing jobs from a computer executing a program utilizing the job scheduling device to the enterprise scheduling agent on a selected node where the job is to execute. Then, the enterprise scheduling agent retrieves job parameters and launches the job on the selected node. The enterprise scheduling agent maintains a local job repository containing job information for each job run on its corresponding node and sends messages to a job data management API to maintain a central job repository containing information on jobs executed on all nodes.