With Predictive and Power dialling I want to know more about the time period PC is analysing to make its calculations - for example is it just using the last hour/half hour, or an average across the day?

Also if there is a sudden increase in live people due to the time of day having a better contact rate, how quickly will PC realise this and adjust the dialling rate to prevent high abandon %?

PureCloud Dialer looks at the whole day's performance to adjust the pace, but it is also constantly adjusting the pace as it gathers more data. So, it reacts very quickly to changing circumstances (such as an increase in the contact rate).

I am using a Power dialer, however I'm seeing an extremely high Abandon rate on the reporting, and my agent idle time appears to be worse than it was using a Progressive dialer.

My Campaign config is set to 5% abandon rate, but my reported Abandon rate is ~40% and my Adjusted Calls/Agent is 1.00. 

Is there likely a config issue on my end? Or is this a fault with Purecloud?

I had a scenario similar of what you describe. high abandon rate  and many agents idle

In my case, the problem identified was something in the trunk signaling that was causing a delay to complete the call on both sides and transfer to the agent.

I'm not a tech person, but I hope this helps 

That's a good point, @Erison Mogari . Anything that delays the call getting connected to the agent leads to more abandons, thus fewer calls placed per agent, thus more agent idle time.

@Katy Roose , are the users set to auto-answer?

Also, take a look at the Dialer Call History report to see how the calls are being dispositioned. That report also shows a "Time to Answer" and a "Time to Connect"...the difference between those is how long it took from the time the customer answered until the call connected to an agent. (Note that the report will not show calls that detected SIT or something other than a live person, busy, answering machine, fax...something that answered the call).

If you need to see the system disposition for all the outbound calls, you'll need to query using the PureCloud API:

https://developer.mypurecloud.com/api/rest/v2/analytics/index.html#postAnalyticsConversationsDetailsQuery