Calendar overview
The Calendar displays the following information in a calendar-like schedule for a selected duration:
- Problems and incidents with their reported dates and target dates (version 8.1 SP1 and later)
- Changes and releases with their scheduled start and end dates
- Business events and activities
- Planned and unplanned outages (CI unavailability)
- A planned outage is the planned, scheduled downtime of a CI. Typically, a planned outage occurs during a scheduled change.
- An unplanned outage occurs when the CI experiences a sudden, unpredictable service downtime. Typically, an unplanned outage is caused by an incident. (version 8.1.01 and later)
Support of viewing and managing incidents and problems is available from version 8.1 SP 1 and later.
You can drag changes and releases to or edit them within the Calender. This functionality is not available for problems and incidents.
Filters enable you to select the primary data sources (incidents, problems, changes, and releases) and secondary data sources (such as business events and outages) in the Calendar view. Other secondary data sources, such as tasks or manifests related to the corresponding primary data sources, can be viewed in the Timeline view of the Calendar.
With the help of links to investigative and analysis tools, the Calendar can help you better understand the risk and impact of changes and releases. Because of better planning, you can make more productive decisions about the forward schedule of changes (FSC). The Calendar also helps you consider potential conflicts by displaying both events and outages for the selected duration.
Service Pack 1 for version 8.1.00 and later provides investigative links that help determine whether multiple incidents were created as the result of an outage, enabling you to determine whether the incidents could have been prevented. For example, if multiple incidents were submitted because an email server went offline because of a patch installation, the administrator can create a problem and also broadcast the outage. The Calendar can thus help you consider inter-dependencies.
Recommendations
- Performance issues occur when you use the Calendar in Microsoft Internet Explorer version 8. Use the latest version of Mozilla Firefox or Internet Explorer 9 for viewing the Calendar.
- Keep the default view as Calendar and the duration as Month.
Note
You can configure the maximum number of records that are displayed in the Calendar. For more information, see Limiting the number of records that appear in the Calendar. If the number of records exceeds the limit that you set, the Calendar does not show all the records. For example, if the limit is set to show 100 records, only the first 100 records are displayed. By default, the records that are displayed are sorted by start date and the start time of the activity.
Comments
I can see Changes/Tasks, Releases/Activities, and Business Events in the Calendar, but I am unable to get Outages/availability-Unavailability time segements to show up in the Calendar.
How is this supposed to work? What needs to be configured?
Is there a bug in 8.1 that keeps this from working and requires SP1 for this feature?
I am looking at different ways of using the Change Calendar to create change freeze windows. The client also want Change Calendar to hold holidays. This is quite basic requests. I cannot find any suggestions in this area documented by BMC?
Thank you for comment.
Creating a change blackout period, you can get a change freeze window. For more information see, Registering time segments for CIs - Creating a blackout schedule.
I will work with the development team to see if we have provisions to have the calendar hold holidays.
Regards,
Priya
Priya,
I would suggest a minor change in Business Time Segments. There could be an option there to allow the selected Business Time Segment to be visible in the Change Calendar. Or there could be a Change Calendar configuration setting to allow Business Time Segments to be visible in the Change Calendar.
Regards,
Terje
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