Managing time zones

In this topic you can find information about managing time zones.

HCL Universal Orchestrator supports time zones specified with the area/city format, for example America/New_York or Europe/Paris.

Time zone settings apply to workstation, job, and job stream definitions.

If different time zones have been set on an agent, the time zone specified on the job stream or on the workstation applies. The time zone set on the agent is used as the default value during the creation of the workstation.

Managing daylight saving time

In this section you can find information about how HCL Universal Orchestrator manages the daylight saving time (DST) options.

Moving to daylight saving time on
The implementation of DST sets the clock time forward by one hour, resulting in a leap of one hour. The instances that are scheduled in that missing hour, are moved at the beginning of the DST. For example, if JOB_A is scheduled to run at 2:30 a.m. and the DST shifts from 2 a.m. to 3 a.m., JOB_A scheduling time moves to 3 a.m. If multiple instances of the same job stream are scheduled in that time interval, only one instance runs at 3 a.m.
Moving to daylight saving time off

Moving to DST off, the clock time is set to one hour earlier with respect to the DST time, resulting in an hour that repeats twice. The instances that are scheduled to run in the repeated hour are scheduled in the first occurrence of that repeated hour.

Job streams that contain the every keyword, run with the defined frequency even during the DST change.

Comments

Below, you can find more information about some general rules that apply to time zones management.
Time zone of job streams
When defining a job stream, you can set a time zone for the entire job stream and for jobs within the job stream. The time zone that you set on the job stream can be different from the time zone of the jobs within the job stream. You can find time zone conversion criteria below:
  • If no time zone is set for a job within a job stream, then the time zone set on the workstation where the job is scheduled applies.
  • If no time zone is set for a job stream, then the time zone set on the workstation where the job stream is scheduled applies.
  • If no time zone is set for a job within a job stream nor for a job stream, then Universal Time Coordinated (UTC) time zone applies.
Time zone of ocli plan
ocli plan uses the time zone set on the config.yaml file. If a time zone has not been set, Orchestration CLI searches for the time zone set on the operative system. If Orchestration CLI cannot identify the specified time zone, then UTC applies.
Dependency resolution
Dependencies are evaluated using the time zone of the successor job stream, that is the job stream that owns the dependency. If a time zone is not set on the successor job stream, then the rules mentioned in the previous section apply.
Applying an offset to a time zone when scheduling job streams
If you submit a job stream that contains an at dependency with an offset of +n days, HCL Universal Orchestrator adds the specified offset to the date. Then, the time zone that has been set in the at dependency is converted too.