A centralized view of your environment
Dashboards provide a comprehensive, graphical overview of your workload health in real time.
No more scattered data or hard-to-read logs, everything you need is now visible at a glance.

With this centralized view, you can:

• Monitor task status in real time
• Quickly identify bottlenecks
• Optimize resource utilization
• Analyze historical trends and patterns

In short, you turn raw data into actionable insights.

What you can monitor
Dashboards are designed to give you clear visibility into the most important aspects of your orchestration environment, helping you stay in control of both performance and costs.

From a workload perspective, you can easily track the status of your tasks and identify potential issues before they escalate. Whether tasks are running successfully, waiting, or encountering errors, the dashboard helps you spot execution delays and detect missed deadlines, making it easier to troubleshoot and keep your processes on track.

At the infrastructure level, dashboards provide insight into resource capacity and availability. You can monitor workstation connectivity, verify that capacity limits are respected, and understand how resources are being utilized in relation to defined thresholds.

Finally, dashboards also help you keep an eye on consumption and operational costs. With visibility into daily and monthly task volumes, total usage, and dedicated tracking for AI agent calls, you can better understand usage patterns and manage your license consumption over time.

A structured workspace
Managing dashboards is simple and intuitive, thanks to a familiar and well-organized workspace. The Dashboards homepage follows the same structure introduced with the multi-workspace feature, ensuring a consistent user experience across the product.

Why this feature matters
Dashboards mark a major step toward smarter, more proactive workload management.
With this feature, you can:

• Shift from reactive to proactive monitoring
• Reduce troubleshooting time
• Improve operational efficiency
• Gain full visibility into performance and costs

​Dashboards are more than just a new feature, they redefine how you monitor and manage your workload: more visibility, more control, better decisions!

A Quick Guide to Updating Your Preferences
Customizing your time display is a straightforward process handled within the Preferences panel. To update your view, follow these steps:

1. Navigate to the Preferences panel (found under the “Personal” settings path).
2. Locate the Time format section.
3. Click the 12 (AM/PM) or 24 button.
4. Click Save to commit your changes.

Clicking "Save" triggers an immediate update ensuring your workspace aligns with your preferred way of working the moment you return to your tasks.

A clear tree structure highlights discrepancies. Review conflicts navigating the tree view to select the version to keep, preventing critical logic loss. 

​You can simplify the merge process by either accepting all incoming changes or discarding them completely, using the buttons located right above the tree view.

How It Works: Intelligent Conflict Resolution
This feature uses the same Merge logic to ensure accuracy. It performs a three-way comparison to understand the full context of your changes.
To do this, the system tracks a "base definition"—a snapshot of what the item looked like when you first started working on it—and by comparing it against both your current workspace and the latest version on the server, the system can accurately identify how the item has changed.
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Here is how the system handles different scenarios:

• Automerge: The system recognizes as non-conflicts all those non-overlapping changes made by different users, and “automerges” those with no user interaction.
• Conflict Detection: If two users modify the same property, the system flags a conflict and presents a side-by-side comparison to choose the value to keep.
• Structural Changes: The feature detects added or deleted sub-items even if you did not modify a deleted sub-item, the system alerts you to ensure awareness of the deletion before proceeding.

Why "Manual" Merge Matters
While the system performs a check during deployment, the Manual Merge option puts the control in your hands. You no longer have to wait until the final deployment step to find out if your changes are compatible with the team's work. You can perform a manual merge at any time to pull in the latest updates, resolve conflicts early, and ensure your workspace is perfectly aligned with the production model.
For these reasons the Manual Merge feature represents a significant step forward in how teams collaborate on orchestration logic. By enabling you to handle conflicts granularly and visually, we are reducing the risk of errors and overwritten work.

Key Benefits:

• Confidence: Deploy with the certainty that your changes are compatible with the latest model versions.
• Control: Decide exactly when to sync your workspace rather than being forced to do so only at deployment.
• Clarity: The intuitive tree structure clearly highlights where conflicts exist, whether they are property changes or structural deletions

This feature streamlines your development process, making workspace management safer and more efficient.

Note: This feature relies on saving specific version data within the workspace. Therefore, it is available for workspaces created starting from UnO 2.1.4 and HWA/IWA 10.2.7.

Ernesto Carrabba, Product Manager, HCL Clara, HCL HERO and HCL Workload Automation 
Ernesto Carrabba is the Product Manager for HCL Clara, HCL HERO and HCL Workload Automation. Ernesto is a very dynamic product manager with experience in building and launching IoT products, combined with a master's degree in mechanical engineering and study researches on Augmented and Virtual Reality ​

You can download the Talend Cloud plugin from Automation Hub to enhance your Workload Automation setup.

Overview of Talend Cloud
The Talend Cloud integration in Workload Automation provides a powerful, native solution for orchestrating complex data integration and ETL/ELT pipelines. By bringing Talend’s cloud native capabilities into your central automation hub, you eliminate the need to jump between consoles, ensuring that high-volume data movements are perfectly synchronized with your broader enterprise business logic.

Key features:
The Talend Cloud integration is designed to streamline the management of data flows across hybrid and multi-cloud environments:

• Unified task and plan execution: Directly trigger Talend Cloud Tasks (single jobs) or Plans (sequenced orchestrations) from within Workload Automation, removing the complexity of manual API calls.
• Centralized monitoring and logging: Retrieve detailed logs and execution statuses from the Talend Management Console (TMC) directly into your automation dashboard, simplifying troubleshooting and auditing.
• Flexible environment targeting: Seamlessly target specific Environments and Workspaces (e.g., DEV, QA, PROD) to ensure the right job runs in the right context every time.
• Advanced return code extraction: Utilize configurable regex patterns to extract custom return codes from execution logs, enabling precise status mapping and sophisticated error-handling logic.
• Secure remote engine support: Orchestrate jobs executed on Remote Engines or clusters within your own infrastructure, ensuring sensitive data remains secure within your network.
• Simplified API access: Leverage a unified API experience to interact with the TMC, providing a reliable and scalable connection for all your data integration workloads.

Use Cases of Talend Cloud Integration:
The Talend Cloud integration is essential for organizations managing diverse and distributed data landscapes:

• Hybrid cloud data warehousing: Orchestrating the flow of data from on-premises legacy systems to cloud-native warehouses like Snowflake or BigQuery using Talend ETL jobs.
• Automated data governance: Triggering data quality checks and governance workflows as part of a larger end-to-end business process to ensure data integrity.
• Scalable batch processing: Managing high-volume nightly batch runs that require heavy lifting from Remote Engine clusters while maintaining central oversight.
• CI/CD for data pipelines: Automating the promotion of data jobs across different Talend Environments as part of a DevOps-driven release cycle.

Workflow Example: Automated Hybrid Data Warehouse Refresh
The Talend Cloud integration is the backbone of time-critical data synchronization. In a Hybrid Data Warehouse Refresh scenario, the process begins with an external trigger, such as the completion of a daily financial close. Workload Automation initiates a Talend Cloud Task targeting a Remote Engine to extract raw transaction data from an on-premises ERP.
Once the extraction is confirmed via the TMC, the workflow triggers a secondary Talend Cloud Plan to execute the ETL logic that transforms and loads the data into a cloud-based data lake. Throughout the process, Workload Automation uses custom return code extraction to monitor specific business-level success criteria within the logs. Finally, once the data warehouse is refreshed, a downstream reporting job is automatically launched to generate the daily executive dashboard.

In conclusion
​The Talend Cloud integration elevates Workload Automation into a comprehensive orchestrator for modern data architectures. By providing a single point of control for ETL/ELT processes, it breaks down operational silos, ensures high data quality, and allows your IT team to focus on strategic data insights rather than the logistics of pipeline execution.

How a Human task works
Once a workflow reaches a Human Task during execution, its behavior differs significantly from automated steps.
The workflow pauses and the task enters the EXEC state, waiting for user interaction. At this point, the human task becomes visible either to the assigned user or to all users monitoring the associated queue in the Human task dedicated page.
The user with the proper rights to work on it can then open the task and interact with the form defined. After reviewing the provided information and filling in the required fields, he marks the task as completed by selecting one of the available completion buttons.
This action triggers two important outcomes:

• The task transitions from EXEC to SUCC (Success) status
• The collected inputs and selected action are exposed as output properties

These outputs are immediately available to the rest of the workflow, enabling dynamic execution paths. For example, a workflow can branch based on an approval decision or adapt behavior depending on user-provided data.
This mechanism effectively turns human interaction into a native, data-driven step within the orchestration logic.

Manage Human Tasks
​All Human tasks can be monitored through the Human Tasks page in the HCL Universal Orchestrator UI. It can be accessed using the left side menu.

This centralized interface provides a clear overview of task status and ownership, allowing users to quickly filter tasks based on their state. Common filters include: all open tasks, tasks assigned to the current user, unassigned tasks, completed tasks.

Explore the new experience
To get started:
   1. Open the user menu in the top-right corner.
   2. Click Settings
From there, you will have everything you need to personalize your experience and control your system, all in one place.

A structured and role-aware experience
The Settings page is organized into clearly defined sections, enabling you to easily navigate and manage different aspects of your environment.
Depending on your permissions, you will see up to three main sections:

• Personal
• System
• ​Security

This role-based structure ensures that users only access what is relevant to them, reducing complexity while still enabling powerful control where needed.

Personal section: Tailor your experience
The Personal section is designed to help you make the environment truly your own.
Here, you can explore your account information, including name, user ID and group memberships or customize your UI preferences, adjusting font and row size, time zone and display format, theme (for a look and feel that matches your style). And finally you can manage your own API keys.​

​In addition, the security section enables managing API keys used for engine connections and Orchestration CLI authentication. Administrators can create and organize API keys, define their type and usage and revoke access at any time to ensure security and control.

Most businesses rely on a maze of systems, from mainframes and SAP to cloud native applications, and you know the pain of making them work together, or not as the case may be. This chaos isn't just inefficient; it's a drag on your agility, a constant source of errors, and a roadblock to true Digital Transformation.

The Hybrid IT Integration Headache
For decades, IT departments relied on separate, siloed automation tools. You had one tool for scheduling batch jobs on the mainframe, another for orchestrating processes in SAP and native operating system tasks, and maybe another for managing your infrastructure-as-code on AWS or Azure.

The result is a complex, fragmented environment characterized by:

• Manual handoffs: Workflows often stall when they need to jump between systems (e.g., waiting for an email notification to trigger the next process on a different platform).
• Siloed visibility: No single pane of glass to see the status of an entire business process from the initial ERP transaction to the final cloud deployment.
• Scheduling latency: Relying strictly on time-of-day scheduling means processes often start too early (wasting resources) or too late (causing delays) because they can’t react instantly to system events.
• Plugin fatigue: Constantly needing to write custom scripts or purchase disparate integration solutions every time a new tool enters the environment.

This fragmentation is why your crucial business processes still feel sluggish and brittle.

The "Universal" Advantage: One Platform to Rule Them All
HCL Universal Orchestrator was designed specifically to eliminate this fragmentation by acting as the single, intelligent control plane for all your automation needs. The name "Universal" isn't a boast; it’s a core philosophy.

HCL UnO doesn't just manage one type of system; it orchestrates your entire enterprise ecosystem.

Mastery Across the Environment
Whether you are executing high-volume financial postings on a traditional platform or managing elastic scaling in a multi-cloud Kubernetes cluster, HCL UnO ties it all together. Two core pillars enable this mastery:

• Massive integration library: HCL UnO features a deep and broad library of native plugins—not just simple connectors—that allow it to interact natively with hundreds of common IT tools. This includes:
  • ERP Systems: SAP, Oracle EBS and JDE.
  • Cloud Platforms: AWS, Azure, Google Cloud.
  • ITSM/Service Management: ServiceNow, Jira.
  • Legacy and Mainframe Systems: Ensuring that your investments in rock-solid legacy infrastructure remain integral to modern workflows.
• Hybrid environment scope: HCL UnO runs effortlessly across your hybrid landscape, maintaining the same level of control and visibility whether the workload runs on a physical server in your data center, a virtual machine, or a serverless function in the cloud.

Shift from Scheduled to Event-Driven Agility
Perhaps the most significant difference between a legacy scheduler and a modern orchestrator like HCL UnO is the shift from passive, scheduled automation to proactive, event-driven agility.
While HCL UnO can certainly execute jobs at a specific time, its real power lies in its ability to respond instantly to events across your integrated systems.

What is Event-Driven Orchestration?
In an event-driven world, your workflow doesn't wait for the clock; it waits for a signal.

The old way (scheduled): At 10:00 PM, start the data transfer script, even if the required source files aren't ready. (Result: Failure, Rerun, Delay).

The HCL UnO way (event-driven): When a new file lands in the S3 bucket, start the data validation workflow. If the validation is successful, then trigger the SAP posting process and create a success ticket in ServiceNow. (Result: Instantaneous and fully contextual execution).
By making your workflows reactive, you dramatically improve efficiency, reduce latency, and ensure resources are used only when needed. This is the hallmark of modern IT operations.

The Business Value of Centralized Orchestration
For your business, this centralization translates directly into concrete benefits:

• Faster service delivery: Complex business processes spanning multiple systems are executed faster and more reliably.
• Reduced operational risk: Eliminating manual handoffs and relying on proven integration models reduce the risk of human error and minimize service disruptions.
• True end-to-end visibility: You finally get that single pane of glass, allowing you to track the progress and performance of an entire business process from start to finish, regardless of the underlying technology.
• Democratized automation: (As we covered in the first instalment) When integrated with the AI Pilot, even non-specialists can build these powerful, cross-system workflows, freeing up your senior engineers for strategic work.

Endnote
HCL Universal Orchestrator is the unified control plane your business needs to overcome the complexity of siloed, hybrid IT environments. By providing seamless, native integration across every system—from mainframes and ERP to cloud-native apps—HCL UnO ensures that your entire business process is orchestrated end-to-end. Stop relying on fragile, scheduled workflows and embrace HCL UnO’s event-driven agility to accelerate your service delivery and reduce operational risk across the enterprise.
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Start your free trial today or purchase HCL UnO SaaS directly from the HCL Marketplace and take the first step toward true enterprise agility.