HCL Workload Automation, Version 9.4

Forecast plan

The forecast plan is a projection of what the production plan would be in a chosen time frame. For example, if you generated a production plan that covers two days and you want to know what the plan would be for the next week you can generate a forecast plan.

These are the characteristics of a forecast plan:
  • It covers any time frame, in the future, in the past or even partially overlapping the time period covered by the current production plan.
  • It is based on a sample preproduction plan covering the same time period selected for the forecast plan. This sample preproduction plan is deleted after the forecast plan is created.
  • It cannot be run to manage production.
  • It can be managed by users with access build on trialsked file object type set in the security file on the master domain manager.
  • It produces a file stored in the schedlog directory with these properties:
    • The same format as the Symphony file.
    • The file name starts with a leading F.
  • When workload service assurance is enabled, it can calculate the predicted start time of each job in the job stream. You can enable and disable this feature using the enForecastStartTime global option. HCL Workload Automation calculates the average run duration for each job based on all previous runs. For complex plans, enabling this feature could negatively impact the time taken to generate the forecast plan.

While creating a forecast plan the database is locked, and only unlocked when the operation completes.

There is no restriction on the time period selected to generate a forecast plan, but the size of the resulting file containing all forecast plan information must be taken into account.

Because the forecast plan is based on the static information stored in the database, it does not take into account any dynamic updates made to the Symphony file while the production plan is being processed or the preproduction plan, so all the job streams it contains are in one of these two states:
HOLD
If they are dependent on other job streams or if their start time is later than the start of plan time.
READY
If they are free from dependencies and their start time has elapsed.
The operation that can be performed on a forecast plan on the master domain manager is:
creation
It is used to create a forecast plan to have an overview of production in a chosen time frame.

For information on how to create a forecast plan, refer to Planman command line.