Usage

1. Basic Setup

The minimum configuration requires the fields ID, TYPE, START and END as described in Section Data Preparation. After adding the fields the chart is being generated including the dynamic timeline for the overall START and END of all selected jobs. The chart header contains basic KPIs such as number of jobs and lanes, as well as minimum and maximum job runtimes. Individual job information is displayed in a tooltip popup:

The following KPIs / data are displayed in the header:

• Start: the overall (minimum) start timestamp of the entire job net processing
• End: the overall (maximum) end timestamp of the entire job net processing
• Lanes: the number of lanes required to visualize the job net (i.e. the maximum degree of parallelism required for processing)
• Jobs: the number of jobs contained in the chart
• Total duration: the total duration of the processing (from Start to End) in minutes
• Idle: the time between Start and End with no job activity in minutes and percentage of total duration
• Min. Runtime: the shortes job runtime in minutes
• Max. Runtime: the longest job runtime in minutes
• Avg. Runtime: the average job runtime in minutes
• Active: the time between Start and End with job activity in minutes (i.e. Total duration = Active + Idle)
• Work Minutes: the sum of all job runtimes in minutes
• Workload: the calculated average workload of the given execution, i.e. Work Minutes / Active time. The higher the workload, the more processing time was required per active time. Example from the video: workload = 3044856 / 44818 = 67.94

2. Status Information

JobNet Visual can display optional job status information, if an input column is being provided containing job status flags:

• “C”: Completed
• “W”: Warning
• “E”: Error

Simply drag and drop the corresponding data column into the Status field of the visual. A job will then be highlighted with a yellow bottom line in case of warnings and a red bottom line in case of errors. Additionally, a summary showing the numbers of completed jobs as well as jobs with warnings and errors will be displayed in the header after the “Jobs” KPI. Also, a “Status” information will be added to the tooltip popup, if a job does not have status “Completed”:

3. Adding Sub-Runtimes

In some scenarios jobs do need to wait for a certain event to occur affecting the overall runtime of a job. To visualize such runtime influenced, JobNet Visual can be enhanced to display up to four different sub-runtimes. The durations of the sub-runtimes will be displayed in four different striped patterns. You can pull up to four data fields containing sub-runtimes in minutes into the “Sub-Runtimes” data field. The sub-runtime will be displayed in the chart and the legend using the column name of the input field.

In the example in the video, jobs are potentially influenced by certain delay times, like a job start delay or a delay waiting fo a lock. If the data is properly prepared in the input data set then the sub-runtimes can simply be added to the visual.

4. Critical Path

When trying to optimize a job net with a high degree of parallelism it is crucial to understand what sequence of jobs is directly affecting the overall runtime of your processing. This sequence is called “Critical Path”. Calculating the critical path lets you identify candidates for runtime optimization that will directly affect overall runtime. JobNet Visual automatically calculates the jobs on the critical path and highlights them using the following three options:

• “*”-Marker: every job on the critical path is marked with a little star marker
• You can optionally choose to display a critical line marker that connects all critical jobs to highlight the critical path
• You can optionally choose to hide all non-critical jobs to only show jobs on the critical path

5. Additional Info Items

To provide your users with more information about the jobs you can add up to ten custom information fields which are displayed in the tooltip popup of a job. A field is only being displayed for a job, if it actually contains a non-empty string. You could, for example, use a custom field to add a detailed error status label for erroneous jobs, since the status line input field requires predefined values “C”, “W” and “E”. Make sure to only use short text strings, since it will otherwise negatively affect the rendering of the tooltips as well as the visual’s performance. If you need more than ten fields consider to concatenate strings in the input data set. Just keep in mind that all tooltip texts must be stored in the visualization’s model which might thus affect it’s performance.

6. Job Colors

You can change to colors of the jobs using the following two options:

1. Select a color palette provided by Power BI: In the “View” menu ribbon select a color palette in the “Themes” section to choose any predefined color selection.
2. Provide your own job colors: In the input data set, define a job color in standard Hex color codes (#123456) for each job type. Drag the input color column to the “Job color” visual field and JobNet Visual will switch to custom color mode and use the color definitions found in the input data set. Please note: a job color is assigned to each job type, i.e. all instances of the same job type will have the same color. If you use custom job colors in the input data you should make sure that the same job type always uses the same custom color. However, JobNet Visual will parse the input data and store the custom color for the first instance of a job type only. That means, if you (accidentially) use a different color for the second instance of the same job type, JobNet Visual will ignore the value and use the custom color it registered for the first instance. It also means, that you basically need to provide a value for the custom job color only for the first instance of the job.

In the example of the video, job type “Job25” does not have a valid Hex color code in the input data set. JobNet Visual uses a black color for those jobs to highlight that a custom color code is missing. That way, the report author can react by adding any missing colors accordingly.

7. Using a Day Label

JobNet Visual provides a dynamically generated timeline in the header of the chart. This timeline can be generated over multiple days and even weeks, if required. Besides the hour strings from 00 to 23 it provides a date string that is derived from the START column provided within the input data. Now, in some scenarios a report author might want to display some additional information for a certain date for all report users. This so called “Day Label” is added right to the date string. Examples for Day Labels could be:

• Adding week day information (Mon – Sun) to the timeline to highlight weekends
• Adding public holiday information
• Adding any business-related information connected to a date such as project milestones or any other date-related business information such as a countdown until closing date or similar.

A day label can be provided as an additional input column. The date related to this day label will be derived from the START date of the job in the same input row. Just with the custom job colors, JobNet Visual will register the first combination of derived date and day label for use in the timeline. Any subsequent combinations will be ignored. Example:

The input data contains a row for job type “Job1” that started on 2025-02-07 13:45:01 using day label “Day label 1”. Additionally, it contains another row for job type “Job2” that started on 2025-02-07 15:04:54 using day label “Day label 2”. JobNet Visual parses the input data in increasing order of the START timestamp and thus hits the row for “Job1” first. It derives the date 2025-02-07 from the START timestamp and registers the day label “Day label 1” for this date. It then continues and retrieves the row for “Job2”, which also relates to the same START date 2025-02-07. However, since this date has already been registered, it will be ignored. The day label for 2025-02-07 will be “Day label 1”.