Understanding Simulations

To help you safely test how changes to certain job definitions might affect the performance of AutoSys jobstreams against their SLAs, AAI offers a simulation feature. You can enter your proposed changes and run them in a simulation mode that does not touch the definitions in your live production stream. This can give you valuable insight into the impact of changes before risking production SLA breaches.

How Simulation Works

Using the extensive run data in its historical database, AAI can calculate projected predictions of how jobstreams would perform if certain changes to job definitions were implemented. Then AAI presents the results as simulated runs complete with statistics at overall and jobstream level of how the proposed changes would impact your SLAs. The simulation results are presented visually to help you quickly grasp the potential impact to SLA delivery of the proposed changes.

To further help you envision how the proposed changes would reflect in your daily operations, you can filter for simulated runs on various pages with jobstream run information. This allows you to compare the simulated runs right next to actual runs.

When Simulation Is Helpful

Simulations are helpful whenever you want to introduce changes to jobs in your workload automation scheduler. You might want to implement changes to certain job definitions when you notice that some jobstreams in which the job runs are breaching SLAs or coming increasingly close to missing their SLA deadlines, or you might just see opportunity for optimizing certain key runs by removing unnecessary delays. By running a simulation, you can test definitional changes on SLA fulfillment and gain insight into their impact without risk to your production SLAs.

With a simulation, you can visualize the impact on SLA fulfillment of proposed changes to job definitions such as the following:

• Revising run durations

• Adding new jobs and their expected run times

• Deleting jobs

• Modifying dependencies