We are pleased to announce the general availability of Automation Analytics & Intelligence (AAI) 6.5. Following is an interview with AAI product manager, Jennifer Chisik, covering what’s new with AAI in this release.
What’s new with AAI?
Over the course of the last year, we have focused on delivering a modern and intuitive web UI that includes not only existing AAI features but brand new features that provide streamlined navigation and support for self-service for automation teams, business stakeholders, and DevOps users. The development of the new Web UI has been achieved through close partnerships with our customers and feedback from them.
Last but not least, you may have noticed we changed the name from Automic Automation Intelligence to Automation Analytics & Intelligence which is still AAI for short. We’ve made that change to reflect that AAI supports both Automic Automation and AutoSys as well as many other workload schedulers. You will see this change in our communications and in the product starting with the AAI 6.5 release.
Why has the web UI been such as focus?
The benefits of moving from a thick client to a web UI are numerous. They include no need for a client-side install, no requirement for Java on the client, more modern interactive and dynamic analytics, and simplified data access for improved self-service for business users as well as automation engineers.
What specifically are the new features available in AAI 6.5?
With the 6.5 release, we continue to evolve the web UI and have added several net new features. This is the first release where we surfaced all jobstream and business area information in the Web UI.
New features and enhancements include:
- New Name: Automation Analytics & Intelligence more accurately reflects Broadcom’s commitment to cross-vendor cross-platform automation analytics. There is a single login screen that provides access directly to the new Web UI.
- Business Area / Jobstream Timeline View puts valuable automation data directly into the hands of the business user. This is brand-new functionality that provides at-a-glance views of jobstreams by line of business and how they are performing against their SLAs. It provides summary statistics on forecast jobstream runs, historical runs, and the jobstreams that are currently running.
From this view, you can drill into jobstreams to see a detailed jobsteam information page. See the Jobstream Information page (number 6) below for details.
- Jobstream Definition Grid provides an easy-to-navigate library of jobstreams to allow you to quickly find the jobstream you’re looking for. This provides definitional data for jobstreams. You can filter by the scheduler, business area, parent, job, run frequency, etc. and it can be all exported. There was a similar view in the thick client but it didn’t provide filtering.
- Jobstream Runs Details provides flexible monitoring views customizable to the needs of anyone interested in past, present, or future jobstream run information. The jobstream runs page allows you to have a tabular view of your jobstream runs. This can be used as a real-time monitoring view of your jobstream runs or can be used to look at historical jobstream runs. In addition to date/time, this view can be customized by various filters, sort criteria, and column selection to provide just the view you are looking for.
- Gantt View intuitively helps the user pinpoint the bottlenecks within critical business applications. The Gantt chart view is now available in the Web UI with a correlated Job Detail Grid View. This grid view provides a table that can be filtered and sorted to show details such as only the critical path jobs and jobs that are running longer than average.
- Jobstream Information Page provides everything you want to know about your critical business applications in one place. This brand-new functionality is a drill-down that shows all of the information about a jobstream in a single place. This includes details on SLA and alerting definitions, jobs that participate in the jobstream, run history and SLA compliance for the jobstream, alert history for the jobstream, and more. This data can be customized via filtering, sorting, and column selection and can be exported. The Gantt chart is also available as a drill-down from this screen for details about a specific jobstream run.
This new feature also provides views of jobstreams that miss SLAs at-a-glance and an SLA graph where users can see all the individual runs that made or missed their target.
- Add/Edit/Delete Jobstreams puts administration of your jobstreams at your fingertips.
What’s next for AAI?
AAI will continue to evolve and expand the variety of analytics that it provides to help you manage your increasingly complex automation environments. Keep an eye out for new data insights, dashboards, and reports as they roll out in quarterly releases starting in the early part of 2024.
In addition, AAI will continue to keep up with evolving cloud-based automation solutions, adding support for tools such as Apache Airflow to our library of supported automation engines.
How can customers provide feedback?
We are always interested in feedback from customers. There are several ways to do this which include the AAI Community, through Broadcom Support, and contacting me directly at jennifer.chisik@broadcom.com.
For more on what’s available, watch the AAI 6.5 demo or read the AAI 6.5 Release Notes.
Visit AAI on Broadcom Software Academy to learn more about AAI capabilities through the blog and other content, short demos, and free training.
