ActiveBatch by Redwood Reviews

ActiveBatch controls just about everything in our organization. We do server monitoring with our EDI feeds being inbound and outbound. We do Oracle processing with it. 

It is very comprehensive for what we do and a central point of everything in our organization at this point.

We have some things coded out to execute processes on systems internal to us, but nothing out of the cloud. We have web based products that are internal and made available to our internal users. We have some external users who use these web based products. We control those from within ActiveBatch where we do remote logins and can control some of the processes. This is for internal and external clients' availability.

It reduces the load and manual efforts on everybody's parts. With a thousand jobs running on a daily basis, it allows our programming staff to focus on other things rather than deal with manual programming efforts, taking quite a load off our programming staff. 

The nice thing about ActiveBatch is once we have created a specific job that can be easily be replicated to another job, then minimal changes have to be made. Reduction of coding is substantial in a lot of cases. The replication of one job to another is just doing a few minor tweaks and rolling it into production. This decreases our development costs substantially. 

Automated integrations have helped us build end-to-end workflows. When we send an ACH to the bank, it used to be that a report would had been generated, then somebody had to call the bank and provide the bank with the totals. We are calculating all that now within ActiveBatch, then sending an automated email to the bank informing them of what is contained within the actual ACH. This has eliminated the need for several people in accounting or finance to have to deal with this work. It runs flawlessly. Though, it took a while to develop, it's a good case example.

We do have FTP file triggers and file triggers internally. We don't have to wait for somebody to say, "Hey, we've posted a file. Can you process it?"  The nice thing about ActiveBatch is we can specifically look for triggers, pick stuff up, and process it the minute it hits. So, it takes that step out of the equation of using internal or external people, and asking, "Something's been posted. Can you take care of it?" Instead, it's done and out of the way. This reduces delays.

I find all the features valuable. 

A lot of our server monitoring has becoming more critical. We monitor CPU loads and disk space requirements. Those are becoming more helpful to us from an automation standpoint, where it makes business decisions on returns. It really helps out the entire IT department and the entire company, as it takes a lot of the manual effort away from a lot of people.

It takes a lot of the manual effort off a lot of people from having to continually look at information. We make business rules within jobs. If something is wrong, it will get somebody out of bed in the middle of the night and let them know there is a problem. Rather than people coming in the morning, we have people who get up in the middle of the night and start working. Because when there's a server issue, that just creates a whole problem. This eliminates a lot of that since we catch these problems. We're taking a proactive approach to our internal structures.

The solution provides us with a single pane of glass for end-to-end visibility of workflows. The nice thing about ActiveBatch is you can see at a glance what is running and what's going to run (future runs). It gives us a good snapshot of everything that's going on, which is something that was lacking for years. With our window pane, we can see exactly everything that will happen at a glance.

The console is extremely flexible. We have incorporated things into ActiveBatch that a lot of people never thought possible, e.g., a lot of the server monitoring stuff and we have over a 1000 jobs that run out of it on a nightly basis. From an automation standpoint, it is really reducing the need for so much manual effort, which creates its own problems because we have a thousand jobs. Somebody has to look to determine if there are any issues. So, we have business rules put in place in all our jobs which try to make it easier for everybody. We do banking information, EDIs, specific automation for other applications, service monitoring, and reporting. A lot of the stuff is called from other systems and imported into ActiveBatch, then manipulated. It's so comprehensive.

It may require some weird programming of things. However, most of the time, we can solve the problem and set solutions in place, then it's carried forward to other jobs. 

I would really like to get into Active Directory stuff with it, but that creates a problem in our security audits, etc. We have to tread carefully down that road.

Moving to version 12 will be a real challenge for us because we have to put in a whole new server, as we are on one now that is obsolete. Plus, when we build the whole thing out, we will need to: 

• Build out a test environment. 
• Go through every single one of the jobs, then test out everything on maneuvers.

We will have to engage ActiveBatch in a contractual relationship to help us with this because it will be a huge project.

Eight years.

I have a great impression of the stability. We just keep adding to it, and this thing never fails. It just runs. Comparing that to our back-end systems where there are always problems, ActiveBatch just continually runs. That's what I've told our executive team. I said, "The only time there's a failure in this company is when your back-end systems screw up."

We have limited users in this product. We have a couple of developers (EDI specialists) who look at some of this stuff. We probably have several hundred people who end up with the end result (report distribution) of ActiveBatch via email. We distribute mainly via phones.

I have emailed Active Batch about a couple of things. I have always had great experiences with the technical support guys. Some of them just go above and beyond their call of duty. They are fabulous to work with.

Everything was a manual effort before ActiveBatch.

There are so many different components that we had to integrate with Oracle. There was a lot of back-end work which had to be done when the server was originally built out. Missing those steps would have ended up creating some problems. We had to go through it a couple of times before we got everything straightened out. With the Oracle integration, there are a lot of components that have to be installed correctly. Even when migrating to version 10, we had some issues with that too. There are a lot of internal components with Oracle.

This is sort of where ActiveBatch system falls down just a bit. While it's easy to say, "Your Oracle people need to deal with this." Our Oracle people know nothing about ActiveBatch. There is this back and forth, where ActiveBatch says, "Your Oracle people should be dealing with this," and Oracle people say, "No, we don't know anything about ActiveBatch." Then, it all falls back on me as to what happens. Nobody is taking responsibility. This is the biggest failing for ActiveBatch. It would be nice if Advanced Systems Concepts, Inc. could just say, "We'll help you with this entire process."

We contracted with ActiveBatch to help move us from version 9 to 10. It took us two or three times to get it right because there were components that ActiveBatch wasn't clear on about needing to be installed. They finally came back and helped us on this because we had an engagement contract with them. However, it took a couple of times to do this. The problem in a production environment is you don't have a lot of leeway for downtime. The jobs that we have, they run 24/7/365. Trying to find an open slot to do migrations is pretty difficult.

With the automation efforts that we have done over the years, we have gotten our money back. We save thousands of man-hours annually.

The use of the solution resulted in an improved job success rate percentage of 90 percent. It reduces manual efforts. Once you take manual efforts out of the equation and put business rules in, we find the failures that occur are usually external to the company, not internal anymore. Job failures during the day are a handful out of a thousand jobs, and usually an external issue. It is external vendors not following their rules, though we have business rules and alerts set up to inform them. We send emails back to external clients, and say, "Something was supposed to be posted, and it wasn't posted." In that sense, it has eliminated a lot of those manual effort steps as well. It is all self-contained in ActiveBatch.

Use of the solution has resulted in a 60 to 70 percent improvement in workflow completion times. 

I don't think we've ever had a problem with the pricing or licensing. Even the maintenance fees are very much in line. They are not excessive. I think for the support that you get, you get a good value for your money. It's the best value on the market. I've worked with a lot of products in my career, and this is by far one of the best products I've ever seen. You're getting your value.

We did evaluate other products before purchasing.

We asked for a proof of concept on this solution that ActiveBatch provided. We looked at the scalability, integration, ease of use, and constructing automated jobs. Those were the driving forces in the selection of these products. Their job libraries are so nice. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure some of this stuff out. 

It is a great product. I can't speak enough about it. We haven't found anything that we can't overcome in ActiveBatch. When they put this product out, they thought it out and put a lot of nice stuff into it. There are features we haven't touched yet, even though we have been on it for so many years.

We have never really uncovered anything that's a problem. It is a well-thought-out product and one of the best that I've ever worked with. I would rate this product as a 10 out of 10. I really like this product.

Think about what you want to automate, then put a process flow in place. For somebody who wants to start this, take one job and put a process flow in place, then develop it within the system. Once you get one product in place, it is pretty easy to replicate it. Initially, to get started on some of this, it can be a horrifying effort. It looks overwhelming, but once you get going on this stuff, get one job in place, and figure out what to do, then it's pretty easy to replicate across the board.

All our back-end systems are Oracle driven from an integration standpoint. Oracle interfaces are very nice which helps us a lot because we can do a lot of coding and take care of a lot of the back-end Oracle stuff. However, we don't use external things, like Amazon, as that is against our security

We just started looking at email triggers, but have not implemented any at this point.

We send out requests to leaders for the inputs, and the inputs are either shared via emails or uploaded on SharePoint. Then, we download that data process them, and convert them to consumable format in Excel, the excel files then get uploaded onto SQL servers which are connected to visualization tools, post refresh we publish the reports onto services.

The entire process of scheduling, running DB jobs, applying security, refreshing DB, publish was done manually and repeated whenever new inputs come in, now ActiveBatch has streamlined the entire flow with a minimal error rate.

My team consists of five associates. We mainly deal with pricing, sales operations, reporting, forecasting, and several other analytics.

The use of ActiveBatch has made all our lives easy by automating a lot of manual repetitive tasks that we do on a daily basis. We save hours and effort aand gain a high accuracy rate.

Approximately ~20 hours of manual effort have been reduced to ~5 hours with the help of ActiveBatch.

It has enabled us to work on multiple platforms at the same with its capability to integrate with other applications and web services.

The most valuable feature is the drag-and-drop functionality, which makes it a very easy-to-use software for anyone who is working on the software for the very first time. There is minimal coding knowledge required.

I like the ability to integrate with other applications, software, and cloud services which empowers anyone using the software to work on various platforms at any given time.

The job scheduling feature increases the efficiency of the software as it requires minimal manual intervention.

ActiveBatch is a powerful and robust workload automation tool that is the best in the market. I do not see major setbacks in the software. However, there are a few things that need to be improved to make it more efficient and provide a better user experience, such as: 

• reducing the lag
• having more security privileges
• pricing that is more affordable.

However, these minor improvement areas would not impact the efficiency or accuracy of the software. ActiveBatch still remains on top of all the workload automation software out in the market.

I've used the solution for one year.

I do not foresee any challenges with the software scalability, bigger organizations can easily deploy however pricing might be the primary concern for smaller organizations.

I do not have a case to bring out as I have not faced an issue and have never needed to reach out to support.

Positive

There was no transition from similar software.

The initial setup is a little complex; providing a well-documented user guide would resolve the issue.

We handled the setup in-house.

In terms of ROI, the solution has saved manual hours (from ~20 hours to ~5 hours in a month) and increased accuracy by ~17%.

The initial setup is a little complex. Subscriptions can be made for a group at a reasonable price.

I did also evaluate Jira.

The software is definitely the best. With minor fixes, it could be great and remain very competitive.

We use ActiveBatch to run the data warehouse production batch schedule, which is 24/7. We run, on average, about 200 distinct workflows each day to update the warehouse. And once the warehouse tables are loaded, we trigger our business intelligence reports and our analytics reports. We also use ActiveBatch to run a software tool called iCEDQ for data quality, as well as some Alteryx jobs.

Our production servers are in a co-location, and the solution is deployed onsite there.

Before we had ActiveBatch, we used the Informatica Workflow Scheduler, and we would have to start a downstream workflow, but have it wait for the completion of the first one by a trigger file. So "Workflow B" would be waiting for a control file that said "Workflow A" is done. If we had to do reruns — sometimes we would create a control file by mistake and that would throw off the next day's run — and we'd have to do manual reruns. With ActiveBatch, it's very easy to say, "Workflow A is done, run B," and onward: "Run C, Run D," as soon as they're done. You don't need to worry about whether a control file was created, or how long is the job going to wait for. It gives you much simpler and easy-to-understand control of the flow of jobs, as they run.

Using ActiveBatch hasn't really reduced our code base because we would be developing these workflows in Informatica if we weren't using ActiveBatch. But the scheduling and integration into the batch schedule for something new are much simpler and save us a little bit of time, now that we have everything developed, for the most part. We may go a month without adding anything to our schedule and we may go four or five months without adding anything to the schedule, but it gives us an easier understanding of the flow of the data and helps us make sure dependencies are met in a more straightforward fashion than through the Informatica scheduler.

ActiveBatch hasn't really improved our job success rate percentage. If a job fails, we still get our failure messages from Informatica, and in some cases from ActiveBatch. The biggest benefit is that the biggest issue we were having was the timing of all of the downstream applications from the warehouse, and it has greatly improved that.

And it has saved man-hours, although it has not reduced headcount. It has saved man-hours in that situation when we would have issues and our old scheduling solution would break down because of them. This allows us to not have to worry about how to start the downstream applications, based on the warehouse. I would estimate it saves us about 20 hours per month.

One of the valuable features is the ability to trigger workflows, one after another, based on success, without having to worry about overlapping workflows. 

The ability to integrate our BI, analytics, and our data quality jobs is also valuable. We used to have everything set up just based on time: Run the data warehouse until five in the morning, run BI at 5:30 in the morning. There were times that we missed the deadline so that when the BI jobs would run, the data would be incomplete, or we had a big gap in time where we were missing out on starting early. It has really saved us a lot of man-hours compared to when we would have a data issue and we would have to manually restart all of the downstream jobs, after the warehouse.

ActiveBatch also provides us with a single pane of glass for end-to-end visibility of workflows. That simplifies the process when we check to see if things have run or how they're running. The Map View feature makes it easy to see what the dependencies are. It's helpful to have a visual, top-down look, from start to finish, at what flows are running when you need to look into that.

In terms of the unlimited bandwidth, as far as I can tell it's handled all of our volume without any issues whatsoever. For the analytics stuff and the business intelligence stuff, I don't keep track of how many jobs they have running each day. I can only really check the warehouse, but as far as I can tell it has handled the total volume of our needs without any issue whatsoever.

We use event triggers and file events, and one job we have uses email triggers. Especially for the business side, if they have a list of call center people or a list of promotions or some costing information that they need loaded into the warehouse, it allows us to say to them, "We don't need a dummy file and we don't need a blank file. Whenever you have a file ready to go, just put it on a shared drive and the job will automatically pick it up." So it simplifies our interactions with the business and allows them more flexibility to get their work done. The triggering doesn't so much reduce delays but it alleviates the need either to have the business create a dummy file or to code the job in such a way that if it doesn't find a file to run each day, it won't error-out or have to send an informational message. If we get a file a day, or if we get five files in a day, or if we only get one file every six months, the job just runs when the business has the data available, without our having to worry about it.

We also use an Oracle trigger, although we've had inconsistent performance with the Oracle trigger. It had to do with the timing of the Oracle logs. The Oracle trigger function wouldn't work because Oracle had a lock on the archive log file. We have had a couple of cases where we had to remove that Oracle trigger function from our schedule. But we still use it for some cases.

The thing I've noticed the most is the Help function. It's very difficult, at times, to find examples of how to do something. The Help function will explain what the tool does, but we're not a Windows shop at the data warehouse. Our data warehouse jobs actually run on Linux servers. Finding things for Linux-based solutions is not as easy as it is for Windows-based solutions. I would like to see more examples, and more non-Windows examples as well, in the Help.

I have been using ActiveBatch for almost five years.   

Stability has been excellent. In the four or five years I can't even think of a time when the scheduler went down. We use two agents for production, and a scheduler and two agents for tests, and I can think of maybe three times that we had to reboot one of the agents. But I can't think of a time when the scheduler actually went down.

It seems very scalable. We use a very small portion of the functionality and the available types of jobs. Of the job steps in the library, we only use about 2 or 3 percent of them. We bought it for a specific purpose and it served our purpose quite well.

We have used the technical support. On a scale of one to 10, I'd give the Knowledge Base a six or seven. I would give the actual support folks an eight-and-a-half or nine.

It just depends on who you get to respond to your question or to your issue. We've had folks that have been excellent and have pinpointed the problem right away and given us a clear solution to our problems. And there have been times when we have gotten someone who doesn't quite understand the product and it feels like we're providing them more answers than they're providing us. That's been rare but I can think of at least one case where we had to say, "Can you put somebody else on or ask for some help on our question?" And they eventually did, but it was kind of frustrating. But for the most part, it's been fine.

Ninety-five percent of the warehouse jobs that we run that were Informatica jobs have been replaced with ActiveBatch. We have a couple of jobs with some specialized logic that we haven't taken the time to figure out how to do in ActiveBatch yet. Of the 200 workflows, we run a day, 190 of them or so run through ActiveBatch.

We have seen ROI with the solution. It has simplified the warehouse job flow, our analytics workflow, as well as our business intelligence and data quality workflows. I don't know the exact cost per year of the solution, but it has simplified and made things much easier to understand in terms of dependencies among our data flows.

The breakthrough for us was when we were able to take completely different software tools and integrate them into one long flow of data. We have our Informatica jobs which then trigger some PLC to SQL jobs in ActiveBatch, but they also trigger Alteryx jobs, which is its own software tool. It can integrate and execute iCEDQ, which is its own software, as well as Tableau. The ability to trigger those jobs from completely different software tools, in one flow, has saved us a lot of time and a lot of headaches.

Don't be afraid to dig in and try things. I said one of the weaknesses is the Help, but the Help function has helped me figure a few things out. We have jobs that update the pager email to go from an offsite pager to an onsite pager and back again. So don't be afraid to take the time to try to figure something different out. There are some useful things in the Help.

I'm the primary person using ActiveBatch in the warehouse. A month ago, we had a lot more people using it, but in the travel industry we've already had some severe layoffs. There were 10 people using ActiveBatch. They were all data analysts or data quality analysts, and I am the data warehouse developer. There were also business intelligence developers.

ActiveBatch Workload Automation can be used to increase productivity and for optimum utilization of any IT processes. It provides a centralized platform to monitor, manage and automate the process. With its REST API adapters, It has the ability to integrate with various platforms such as Microsoft, ServiceNow, AWS, Teradata, and many more.

The pre-defined job steps are a superb add-on that saves time and effort in identifying, analyzing, optimizing, preparing, and monitoring the automation process.

Team members with expertise in different tools and server processors are working and monitoring the project via a centralized platform, which means the processes are now agile and instant correction or remediations are being made on the same. This is helping us accelerate and save time, money, and effort.

The user interface is the cherry on the cake as it facilitates simple steps such as drag and drop and scheduling the job. This enables any team member to get accustomed to the tool as quickly as possible.

There are hundreds of pre-built steps. The tool provides an extensive library of pre-built job steps that are ready to go. This is helping me save massive time in identifying the necessity, analyzing the process, defining the process, creating the script, preparing and running the process, etc. Now, the team does not have to create the script and we've eliminated the risk of manual or human error. 

The job scheduling option is easier to allocate jobs and monitor the job. At the same time, it also reminds us of the same.

ActiveBatch provides 24/7 customer support; however it can be enhanced as it is not always easy to get the queries resolved using AI. They need to not rely on AI and provide technical support. An organization like ours would prefer to hear back from an expert either by email or phone to get a response to the queries directly.

They could provide an easier installation guide or technical support to the organizations during the installation process. Due to security checks and various security enablers, it becomes a tedious task to install the software.

I've used the solution for one year.

The prices are competitive (lower) than other tools in the market.

As sales operations analysts, our main task is to deal with cumbersome data, forecasting, and sharing these cleaned data with our global partners.

We clean these data and store it in consumable Excel files and then upload these to SQL servers which are in turn connected to visualization tools and we often refresh these tools to publish our dashboards in service.

ActiveBatch has streamlined all these steps with automation and no manual intervention which has helped to decrease errors.

ActiveBatch Workload Automation is a super robust application FOR Regular SQL tasks or other file maintenance which in turn can help us to free up the time that we spend on working on repetitive tasks. Approximately ~25 hours of manual effort has been reduced to ~5 hours.

It also offers a centralized platform for managing activities across many environments, applications, etc.

ActiveBatch has made our lives very easy by automating a lot of features which has led to fewer errors and more accuracy.

The product:

1. Is very easy to use, has a good user interface, and not many prerequisites are needed.
   
2. Offers a centralized platform for managing activities across many environments, applications, etc.
3. Offers good automation where manual intervention is significantly reduced - which has led to fewer manual errors.
4. Does frequent job runs and the load on the server has reduced.

There are a few improvements needed:

1. ActiveBatch Workload Automation is a super robust application for regular SQL tasks or other file maintenance - although it needs a few tweaks.
   
2. ActiveBatch's user interface needs an update as some features are hidden and repetitive clicks are needed to access those.
3. ActiveBatch scalability can be increased to help working on larger workloads.
4. ActiveBatch event-based triggers are not reliable at times.
5. ActiveBatch UI could use a little more help, and video tutorials would be greatly appreciated for user guides.

I've used the solution for one year.

The stability is good.

I'd rate the scalability nine out of ten.

Customer support response was a bit slow when we needed a technical escalation.

Positive

The initial setup was a bit tedious due to a lack of proper user guides.

We implemented the solution via our in-house team.

ActiveBatch has saved a significant amount of manual time (from ~25 hours down to ~5 hours), hence bang for the buck.

Setting up the solution was quite hard initially. The pricing is pretty agreeable for all our requirements. The licensing is easy as we had the choice according to our requirements.

I did not evaluate other options as Active Batch was the top choice and we opted for this without any second thoughts.

ActiveBatch is a robust automation software and it is our go-to option.

ActiveBatch is used for multiple purposes, including as SAP jobs, file transfer systems (FTP), and data warehouse loads. 

ActiveBatch has numerous functionalities that support different types of workflows, including batch calls and service calls. 

The format of job scheduling is well organized and very similar to what we use in everyday life hence making it easy to use. It is able to control jobs for multiple environments over and across different servers.

We can use and set up automated remediation and alerts for operations that we have created.

ActiveBatch has reduced work by providing automated workflows across several different applications. ActiveBatch also has some of the triggers, such as FTP file triggers, message queue triggers, and so on, to run jobs sequentially, making sure they will be handled in a reliable way. 

It sets up alerts for operational peace of mind. It also has custom rules that we can apply to advanced data/time scheduling and fiscal calendar. 

The best feature that it has solved is the ability to trigger jobs upon completion of warehouse nightly batch jobs.

ActiveBatch has numerous capabilities in the automation tool environment. A normal IT person can only scratch the surface of the tool, whereas a developer who has knowledge of the development of the application over a cloud will likely be able to utilize the maximum of the automation tool. 

There are many of the major utilities, like file transfer systems, job scheduling systems, and others triggers that are amazing to use.

The documentation is very limited, and it can be improved. 

The service for Level One support could be made more reachable. Service pack updates are sometimes hidden/undocumented. This can cause some of the jobs to break up after the SP is installed. They need to ensure users are using the technical support to configure everything at the initial usage. It is sometimes hard to set up permission levels.

I've used the solution for one year.

We have a security project where we need to perform daily scans on a number of our servers and network infrastructure components and keep a check on their health and status. We have implemented the ActiveBatch to perform endpoint security scans on our environment for each and every component and provide us with a detailed report stating their health as well as updating on that server and components that need upgrades. We have scheduled the scans to take place every 12 hours on a daily basis and provide the major stakeholder with detailed reports. 

ActiveBatch has really improved our project by automating the endpoint security scans on our servers and also other components of our environment. 

Being a security project we should have a complete picture of the health of each and every component as well as the servers that need to be upgraded to avoid any malware attacks on non-upgraded servers due to existing vulnerabilities. This has saved associates a number of critical business hours that can be used to concentrate on critical business tasks rather than spending them performing repetitive security scans.

The automation feature is a very valuable feature as the associates do not have to worry about performing repetitive tasks (i.e. endpoint security scans on a daily basis) that would take several hours to complete on a daily basis.

It is also faster and more efficient in conducting endpoint security scans compared to associates who perform it manually, reducing the scope of error and also providing a detailed report on each and every component present in our environment. The reports are very detailed and visually appealing that is shared with major stakeholders.

This product is the gold standard of all the automation tools around. You can schedule jobs easily. It is faster and also more efficient. The product also provides a detailed dashboard after the endpoint security scans are performed. 

The only service that needs improvement is integration support. There are very few documents that provide us with detailed information on the troubleshooting of errors that occur during integration with the existing environment. The team could create more documents and also publish blogs to support customers with queries. 

I've used the solution for less than a year.

Initially, we were facing a lot of difficulties in monitoring the scheduled jobs. We had to create multiple tasks for managing servers and get it done by using change requests. It was very hectic and time-consuming as we had to monitor each and every server manually. 

After implementing ActiveBatch workload automation we were able to automate all our tasks and build reliable workflows. It provides an option of triggers to eliminate errors and automate triggers based on events/actions. Monitoring, scheduling, and controlling workflows of the jobs and tasks have been simplified in half the time.

We have to monitor our backup servers on a daily basis, creating dump files and verifying all the active master servers that have gotten at least one dump parsing data entry. It's helped with checking servers with error status and analyze/fix/report and monitoring for the latest dump files in the server. These were the most time-consuming tasks and required more attention. Active Batch has helped us to automate these tasks by reducing resource usage and giving us more time for extra productive hours other than monitoring. We are able to track down the server failures easily and fix the issue within the SLA targets thereby achieving effective and improved business processes.

ActiveBatch is highly reliable and scalable for all our automation work. The tool provides excellent service management and intelligent automation for scheduling complex jobs. 

It processes heavy workloads on servers hassle-free - proving the tool's stability. 

ActiveBatch provides summary reports and logs for further analysis and improvements in monitoring servers, which is very handy. With the help of ActiveBatch, we were able to reduce a lot of scripting work for automation tasks as the tool supports max scripting.

Overall, ActiveBatch is highly recommended if you are really struggling with daily monitoring tasks.

I don't see any drawbacks with the usability, however, the documentation part can be improved with some additional guidance about the features and their usage. I have faced struggles to understand, set up the tool, and implement it in my early days as a new user. 

The UI also could be a little more advanced in the next release along with some video tutorials - such as providing a user guide. 

I am using ActiveBatch for two years.

Customer support is good. We were able to get in touch with them when we had queries.

Positive

We did not use any software before; it was completely manual.

As a beginner, the setup was pretty hard due to a lack of deep guidance or documentation.

After automating, we are able to achieve our SLA targets thereby reducing the SLA breach and increasing the KPI by 98% - which is a great ROI.

Setting up the environment was quite hard initially. The pricing seemed to be pretty decent in the market for all our requirements. The licensing is easy as it can be chosen according to the plan that makes the most sense.

We evaluated other software, however, ActiveBatch seemed to be a perfect fit for our requirements.

Active Batch is my go-to option for all my automation-related work.