Answer
Prerequisite detection is the piece most legacy schedulers get wrong. A job finishing with a normal completion code is not the same as its output being usable, so the software needs to check that an inbound file actually landed, that its record count is non-zero, and that the timestamp is current before triggering the next step. Retry logic needs the same nuance: a job that failed because a file was momentarily locked should retry automatically within a defined window, while a job that failed because the source data was malformed should not retry blindly and burn an hour before anyone notices.
Escalation quality matters as much as detection. A useful alert names the workflow, the exact step that stopped, and the job log or error text, so the on-call person can triage from a phone instead of remoting into the LPAR at 3 a.m. just to find out what broke. Buyers should ask whether dependency and retry rules can be built and changed by IT staff without a programmer, and whether the software can read job status and messages directly from IBM i message queues like QSYSOPR rather than relying on a separate polling layer.
The most common implementation mistake is buying capable software and leaving the old manual restart runbook in place. Reducing overnight supervision requires redesigning who gets paged, what they see, and what they are allowed to restart themselves, not just adding a monitoring layer on top of unchanged procedures.