Trending by Critical Path History Report

The Trending by Critical Path History report uses large sample data to spot trends in jobstreams based on how many times the individual jobs have been on the critical path. This report also provides information on the average execution times of the jobs. The purpose of this report is to pinpoint the jobs that consistently create bottlenecks. These jobs are candidates for optimization.

The report is based on the data derived from the statistical analysis of the following data points:

• Number/percentage of appearances on the critical path

• Projected average duration

  Duration that is predicted by extending the trend line to the end time for the report. Since most of the time you report on a time span up to the present, this gives an estimate of how long the job is likely to run today.

  • Trend (per week) Weekly average increase in duration, again taken from the trend line.

  • Trend % (per week) is that number as a fraction of the projected duration.

• Goodness of fit

  Statistical standard that describes how well a dataset is modeled by a linear fit. In this report, it means putting all the data points together and expressing it in a percentage.

  Looking at a chart in this report, if all the points fall precisely on the line that would give a goodness of fit of 100%, which means that the jobs is an absolute candidate for optimization. A completely random scatter of values gives 0%. If there is some trend (the durations are typically increasing), but a significant amount of variation around it, then you will get value in the middle. This gives a general sense of which jobs are progressing longer, but being only a single number, it does not really say much about how or why. In general, anything less than 50% is not really showing a distinct trend.

General

Here you determine the jobstreams or business areas for which you want to generate the report. By default, all the business areas in your client are selected. Use the Add and Remove buttons to select the jobstreams or business areas that you want to include.

Finding the Jobstreams/Business Areas you Need

The Available pane shows all the business areas and jobstreams in your client, which can potentially be thousands of them. Use the Categorized, Alphabetic and Matching options at the bottom of this pane to organize this data so that you can easily find what you need:

• Categorized

  The jobstreams are organized by business areas in a tree view.

• Alphabetic

  The jobstreams are displayed alphabetically without indicating their business area.

• Matching

  This search is useful if this pane contains many jobstreams. It provides various search options. It lets you search for jobstreams using regular expressions. It is a powerful tool to find matching patterns that you can select in bulk and move to the Selected pane

Sorting Data

For each day in the report, you can choose how to sort the time periods.

Trend Info

If you want to filter by trending data, you must include it here and define the filters that you want to apply. For example, you can exclude jobs whose runtime times are not trending up at a particular minimum because you know that those will not be candidates for optimization.

Columns

By default all columns are selected, which means that all fields will be considered in the report. You can remove the columns that you do not want to show. Also, use the up and down arrows to modify the order of the columns in the report.

Format Options

You can produce the report in multiple formats: PDF, HTML, XML and CSV. On this tab you specify the formatting options.

You can also generate the report in any specific time zone, which is particularly useful for teams that are distributed in different time zones. When you run the report, the dates will change and adapt to the selected time zone.

Example

Double click a report or select it and click the Run report in the toolbar. A message saying Run report is displayed over the AAI main tabs that lets you know that the report is still generating. When finished, the report opens in your browser.

This is what a Trending by Critical Path History Run report could look like:

This report consists of two parts, a table with numbers and a graph per job.

• Red dots

  In the current execution, the job was included in the jobstream critical path.

• Blue dots

  These are non-critical path runs.

• Hollow dots

  These indicate outliers. (AAI keeps them in the database but does not include them in the statistic calculations.

• Black line

  This line illustrates the execution runtimes over time. A line that is trending upward means that the runtime is increasing.

This report shows a 3-month period. At the beginning, the jobs was executing in a bit over 25 minutes. Toward the end of the period, the execution time is over 30 minutes. There is an upward trend, an increase by almost 5 minutes, indicated by the steeping line.

In this particular case, the job's increasing average duration, the fact that toward the end of the period it is more and more often included on the critical path and its high goodness of fit tell us that this job is a good candidate for optimization.

See also:

Reporting