Timeline

The timeline is displayed in a Forward Thinking scenario below the sunburst. It allows you to plan when an operation needs to be performed for your scenario in the future.

Using a Baseline View as a starting point, you can try out potential future changes and understand the impact they will have on things like system performance, capacity, or costs.

You can use the timeline to plan exactly when each operation needs to be carried out. For more information about operations that you can carry out, see Operations.

The Forward Thinking timeline lets you:

• See what your estate is doing now.
• Predict what could happen to the estate if you do nothing.
• Plan to introduce changes at relative points in the future.
• Experiment with what will happen when you do introduce that change.

Breakdown Copied

The timeline is broken down into days. Days are marked off individually on the timeline and are the smallest unit of time you can plan against. Each operation must take place on a single day, although a single day can contain multiple operations.

For example, a large migration may need to take three days. You can split it by migrating portions individually over the course of the three days, performing separate operations as necessary. Then, if you also need to perform an upgrade as part of the migrations, you can add that as a separate operation on the same days.

The currently selected day is always highlighted on the timeline with the purple circle. Your Baseline View is day 0 and it represents where you are today. Any operation must take place beyond that point in the timeline, starting with day 1.

Note

The date of the timeline is always relative to the baseline used to create a scenario. If you use the default baseline when creating your scenario then the date of each day on the timeline is relative to the most recent data.

.

Timeline indicators Copied

Indicators appear on the timeline to represent groups of operations that have been scheduled to take place at some point along the timeline.

Some indicators, such as notification of overcommitment, do not appear for individual operations. If any operation on the same day on the timeline results in overcommit, the warning indicator is used.

Indicators can be moved along the timeline to adjust the scenario to minimise the impact of conflicting operations.

Operations appear as one of three types of indicators on the timeline:

• Success — green icons are indicators of one or more successful operations on the specific day. Hover over the icon to see how many operations were successful.
• Warning — yellow icons are indicators of one or more operations that resulted in overcommit. This means that there is not sufficient capacity to deal with the demand or with the expected utilisation at this point.
• Error — red icons are indicators of one or more invalid operation. This tends to happen when operations are deleted in the wrong order. For example, you may migrate some workloads to a specific server on day 10 of the timeline. If you then go back to day 5 and remove that server, the operation on day 10 shows as error.

Note

If several operations end in mixed outcomes for the same day, then the indicator shows the prevailing outcome among the operations. For example, if there are two successful operations, three that produced warnings, and one invalid operation in a day, then the timeline shows the error indicator.

To see details of the operations and their statuses, click the indicator for the selected day. For more information, see Operations.

Move groups of operations across the timeline Copied

Groups of operations, denoted by a single indicator on the timeline are not fixed points on that point on the timeline. You can move certain operations around to suit your plans for the estate.

This is useful if you want to see the gradual impact on your IT infrastructure during a series of operations, for example, when adding multiple workloads over a period of time.

To move an indicator on the timeline, follow these steps:

1. Click and hold the indicator representing the operations you want to move.
2. Drag the indicator to the new point on the timeline where you want the operations to occur.

The sunburst chart updates itself to account for the new changes. The timeline also updates itself to account for any operation that may now be invalid, successful, or that create overcommitment as a result of your change.

Scrolling across the timeline Copied

There are two ways to scroll across the timeline:

• Click the arrows on either side of the timeline to jump forward or back in time.
  The amount the timeline jumps depends on how many weeks you are viewing. If you have 8 weeks displayed on the timeline, the arrows will jump 8 weeks ahead or back.
• You can click and drag the timeline to scroll along its length.