PRODUCT DATASHEET

BMC Control-M/Forecast
Gain visibility and insight into the impact of changes to your scheduled workloads to avoid problems and ensure that service level commitments are met. Verify complicated scheduling rules with a visual calendar. Use "what-if" scenarios to simulate problem resolutions or model workload or IT infrastructure changes.

Key Benefits

Business Challenge
Enterprises depend on IT to ensure that critical business services run smoothly. The complex and dynamic nature of the typical IT infrastructure, however, makes it challenging for IT professionals to predict the impact of unexpected job delays or planned changes in the workload processing environment. For example, its difficult to determine how to resolve a delayed job this afternoon or which business services will be affected by a four-hour shutdown of a backup server next week. IT staff also struggle to validate the exact dates of scheduled job flows for critical business services. For example, what impact will a change to the business receipts processing calendar have on the financial workload? Without full visibility into the impact of workload schedule changes, its nearly impossible to deliver quality services at committed service levels.

Ensure that service level agreements are met by proactively identifying and correcting problems that might disrupt critical business services Mitigate risk by using extensive simulation capabilities to avoid a trialand-error approach in the production environment Streamline scheduling to reduce staffing requirements and administrative overhead, resulting in higher productivity and lower costs

The BMC Solution

BMC Control-M/Forecast lets you see into the future and make informed decisions. By analyzing the expected behavior of your scheduled jobs at the enterprise level, you can identify problematic workloads and take corrective action so that business-critical processes run as expected. The schedule verification functionality in BMC Control-M/Forecast lets you visualize workload schedules in advance and resolve inaccuracies before they disrupt those critical services. Through what-if scenarios, you can simulate the expected job flow in your workload processing environment by modifying various workload attributes and observing the impact. This predictive analysis capability helps you choose the best course of action to address immediate job scheduling problems or to optimize IT infrastructure or workload changes planned for the future.

Verify schedule accuracy

BMC Control-M/Forecast assists you in preventing unexpected job executions by providing schedule verification capabilities. Using a new or previously defined job, you can generate a visual calendar that displays all the dates on which the job will be scheduled, which is particularly useful for validating the accuracy of complicated scheduling rules. The calendar takes into consideration all available scheduling factors, including: Scheduling definitions based on "month days" and "week days" Usage of specific calendars

With this graphic presentation, you can quickly validate that jobs are not scheduled to run on nonworking days, such as holidays. If you are not satisfied with the planned schedule, you can

Figure 1. Calendar view in BMC Control-M/Forecast

easily make schedule changes and verify that the changes are correct.

Simulate problem resolutions and changes to choose best approach

With hundreds or thousands of jobs supporting numerous business services, workload scheduling can be complex. When jobs fail or are delayed, you need to be able to address problems quickly and appropriately without risking a trial-and-error approach in your production environment. Similarly, when you are planning modifications in your workload processing environment whether because of changes in business volume or IT infrastructure you need assurance that these changes will not disrupt business services.

Key Capabilities

To ensure that scheduled jobs are executed as planned and service levels are met, BMC ControlM/Forecast analyzes your workload scheduling environment, predicting the behavior of future job flows. Whether youre responding to an immediate job scheduling problem or determining how to implement a planned IT infrastructure change, you can use what-if scenarios to simulate various approaches and choose the best path, avoiding negative business impacts. Whats more, identifying bottlenecks or available time slots within the scheduled job flow is straightforward, as is validating the accuracy and effect of ongoing changes to the job flows. A flow diagram and a tabular display show job impact and provide information, such as: Scheduled tasks and their dependencies for the requested date Estimated time execution window for each job Filtering capabilities Extensive information about each jobs estimated lifecycle Business service analysis through integration with BMC Batch Impact Manager

Run what-if scenarios to visualize the impact of optional changes to workloads or infrastructure Validate the accuracy of workload planning using an enterprise view of the job flow for a specific date, including estimated time windows for each scheduled task Prevent unplanned and unexpected job executions by ensuring that scheduling attributes are correct Identify processing bottlenecks and potential problems by generating valuable trend analysis and workload reports

BMC Control-M/Forecast also allows these capabilities within the wider scope of the business service, which comprises more than a single job. When validating the accuracy of a business service schedule, BMC ControlM/Forecast displays a matrix of the planned execution of each job in the business service.

Figure 2. BMC CONTROL-M/Forecast future date batch flow, with estimated time windows

Enable analysis through extensive reporting

Extensive reporting capabilities allow analysis of your workload processing environment so you can identify trends and react accordingly. Generating forecast reports, such as those listed below, is simple with BMC Control-M: Analysis of peak execution time windows for the last business day of the previous quarter Trend analysis displayed as a histogram of all jobs associated with a specific application running within a specified time frame during a specified time period (for example, "the HR application running on Thursday afternoon between 14:30 and 17:00 during the last two months")

BUSINESS RUNS ON I.T. I.T. RUNS ON BMC SOFTWARE.

Business runs better when IT runs at its best. Thats why more than 25,000 IT organizations from the Global 100 to the smallest businesses in over 120 countries rely on BMC Software to manage their business services and applications across distributed, mainframe, virtual and cloud environments. With the leading Business Service Management platform, Cloud Management, and the industrys broadest choice of IT management solutions, BMC helps customers cut costs, reduce risk and achieve business objectives. For the four fiscal quarters ended December 31, 2011, BMC revenue was approximately $2.2 billion.

All job execution times for the previous night

Each report provides a graph to speed the discovery of trends or specific peaks enabling you to drill down to the specific job level.

Part of a Comprehensive Solution

BMC Control-M/Forecast is a component of BMC Control-M Workload Automation. With BMC Control-M, you get these advantages: An enterprise view delivers a single point of control and a unified view of all workload processing. Service level management lets you schedule workloads based on business needs and prioritize job streams accordingly. Self Service empowers business users by providing workload state and status and enabling tasks through a Web interface and mobile app. Extensive reporting and analysis capabilities facilitate auditing, regulatory compliance, forecasting, and fast recovery. Cloud enablement provides cloud resources dynamically for peak-period and low-cost processing.

For More Information

To learn more on BMC Control-M, please visit www.bmc.com/control-m.

BMC, BMC Software, and the BMC Software logo are the exclusive properties of BMC Software, Inc., are registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and may be registered or pending registration in other countries. All other BMC trademarks, service marks, and logos may be registered or pending registration in the U.S. or in other countries. All other trademarks or registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners. 2007, 2012 BMC Software, Inc. All rights reserved. Origin date: 03/12

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