Agent Slots

As a system administrator, you want to find a time frame in which Agents are idle. You can use this information, for example, to identify maintenance windows to carry out an Agent upgrade.

You can then access the Agent Slots page from the Forecasts tab in the Process Monitoring perspective.

Prerequisites

To be able to calculate Agent slots, you must have autoforecast data available. The period for which the autoforecast data was calculated is also displayed below the Agent Slots page caption. If there is no autoforecast data available, you have to recalculate the forecast cache.

More information:

• Autoforecast
• Working with Autoforecast

Finding Agent Slots

You have to use the Filter on the right pane to specify your search parameters. After defining them, select Filter to trigger the search. The results are displayed in the Agent Slots list.

The following filter options are displayed by default:

• Agent Name

  Enter the name of a specific Agent. You can also use a wildcard character (*) to replace part of the name.

• Maximum Displayed Agents

  Define the maximum number of Agents you want to have displayed. By default, the system displays the first 50 Agents alphabetically.

• Time Frame

  You have two options to define the time frame:

  • Enter a starting and ending date and time

  • Use the Within next <xxxx> option and define if you want to search within a specific number of Minutes, Hours, Days, Weeks, Months, or Years.

  Important! You can only search for Agent slots within the time frame of the autoforecast data available. Defining a period partially or completely outside that time frame returns a single slot because the autoforecast function has data for that time frame. For example, if the time frame you define in the filter for the Agent slot search exceeds the time frame of the autoforecast data available by one day, the system returns that day as one slot.

• Agent Type

  Enter a specific platform to limit the search to Agents of that platform.

You can also select Add Filter Criteria to add the following filtering options:

• Agent Version

  Enter the version of the Agent. You can also use a wildcard character (*) in the search.

• Minimum Required Time Slot

  Define the minimum duration required for the time slot. For example, you can search for a minimum of one hour. In this case, the results do not include shorter time slots.

• Only Consider Task(s)

  This option allows you to search only for Agent slots in which specific tasks (such as critical tasks) are not running instead of considering all tasks that are planned for the time frame you defined.

  Enter the name of a specific task. You can also enter part of the name followed by an asterisk (*) to consider all tasks that start with the letters you entered.

The Agent Slots List

The search results are grouped by Agent. Click the arrow to the left of an entry to display all the slots available for that particular Agent.

The following information refers to the Agents:

• the Name, Platform, and Version of the respective Agent

• the Slots column displays the number of slots that match the search criteria for that specific Agent

The following information refers to the Agent slots:

• the Logical Start and Estimated End columns specify the date and time in which the system expects the Agents to be idle

• the Duration column displays the length of a particular slot

You can export the data as a .CSV file, see Exporting Tables to CSV.

See also:

• Forecasts
• Working with Forecasts
• Autoforecast
• Working with Autoforecast