Plans

Different types of plans you can access to manage the objects and the activities they contain.

A plan contains all jobs and job-related scheduling objects that are scheduled for a selected time interval. There are different types of plans based on the type of HCL Workload Automation environment you are connected to.

Note: The only type of plan that you can access through the Dynamic Workload Console is the current plan.

The following plans are available:

Production plan (current plan)

A production plan (in distributed environment) or current plan (in z/OS environment) is the master control for all job scheduling activity planned for a user-defined time interval, named the production period. Scheduling object definitions stored in the database, such as jobs and job streams, become instances in the production plan, where they can be monitored and modified.

The production plan is created on the master domain manager and contains all the jobs and job streams that are scheduled to run within the production period together with their depending objects and all workstation definitions. You do have the opportunity to make additional changes to job definitions even once they are in the plan as long as the job has not yet started running. If the job has already run, you can update the definition and rerun the job. Only the job instance is modified. The job definition in the database remains the same. The production plan can be extended to cover future time intervals. Any job streams that did not complete successfully within the production period or that are either running or still waiting to be run, can be carried forward into the plan extension.

The production plan data is stored in the Symphony file and replicated in the database. With HCL Workload Automation version 9.1, accessing this information from the Dynamic Workload Console directly queries the database thereby improving response times.

Preproduction plan

A preproduction plan is used to identify in advance the job stream instances and the job stream dependencies involved in a specified time period.

This improves performance when generating the production plan by preparing in advance a high-level schedule of the anticipated production workload.

The preproduction plan contains:

• The job stream instances to be run during the covered time period.
• The external dependencies that exist between the job streams and jobs included in different job streams.

Symnew plan

A Symnew plan is a temporary plan. It is an intermediate production plan that covers the whole time the new production plan that is being generated will cover. It is replaced by the production plan as soon as it starts.

Archived Plan

An archived plan is a copy of an old production plan that ran in the HCL Workload Automation environment and that is now stored in the HCL Workload Automation database.

Using this type of plan you can, for example, see the result of running a past production plan. The difference between using an archived plan and a forecast plan covering the same time interval is that an archived plan shows how the real production was based on the job and job stream processing results, while a forecast plan shows how the production was planned to be.

Trial plan

A trial plan is a projection of what a production plan would be if it covered a longer period of time. For example, if you generate a production plan that covers two days, but you want to know what the plan would be if it covered three days, you can generate a trial plan.

A trial plan is typically created to extend a production plan and to have an idea of future impacts on the scheduling environment. Therefore, if there is a valid production plan, the start time option is greyed out. By default, the trial plan start date is the same as the production plan end date.

Using this type of plan you can, for example, see how the current production evolves based on the job and job stream dependencies defined in the production plan, if available, or in the preproduction plan. Trial plans are based on the information contained either in the production or in the preproduction plan. If neither is available, a trial plan cannot be created.

Forecast plan

A forecast plan is a projection of what the production plan would be in a chosen time interval. For example, if you generate 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.

A forecast plan is typically created to anticipate and solve any kind of scheduling problems, therefore the start time is always enabled and it is a mandatory field.

Using this type of plan you can, for example, see how the production will be in a future time interval based on the job and job stream dependencies defined in the HCL Workload Automation database. Based on this information, you can modify some information in the database, if needed, before extending the production plan.

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 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.