Production process

HCL Workload Automation production is based on a plan that runs in a production period.

You can define the production period when creating or extending the production plan and it can span from a few hours to multiple days (by default it lasts 24 hours).

The production plan contains information about the jobs to run, on which fault-tolerant agent, and what dependencies must be satisfied before each job can start.

You use the JnextPlan script to generate the production plan and distribute it across the HCL Workload Automation network. Then, if you want to extend your production plan at a fixed time interval, for example every day, you have the option to automate the extension by using the final job stream at the end of each production period. A sample job stream helps you to automate plan management and runs the sequence of script files included in JnextPlan to generate the new production plan.

When the production plan is generated, all of the required information about that production period is taken from the scheduling environment and object definitions and is included in the plan.

During the production period, the production plan is regularly updated to show what work is completed, in progress, and left to process.

In HCL Workload Automation for distributed environments or in a z/OS end-to-end network, a file called Symphony contains all the information about the production plan. This file is sent to all the subordinate domain managers and fault-tolerant agents in the scheduling environment. This allows the fault-tolerant agents throughout the network to continue their processing even if the network connection to their domain manager is down.

HCL Workload Automation processes monitor the production plan and make calls to the operating system to launch jobs as required. The operating system runs the jobs, and informs HCL Workload Automation if the job completed successfully. This information is used to update the production plan to indicate the status of the job.

From the Dynamic Workload Console or the command line interface, you can view and make changes in the current production plan.

Even once job definitions have been submitted into the production plan, you still have the opportunity to make one-off changes to the definitions before they run, or after they have run. You can update the definition of a job that has already run and then rerun it. You can update a job definition from either the Job Stream Graphical view, the job monitoring view, or from the conman command line. The job definition in the database remains unchanged.