ActiveBatch by Redwood Reviews

Our project has nearly 150 jobs that run every day, and they manage anything from SaaS. We run a lot of reports and triggers, Some of these are fairly complex, and others are very simple.

We pull information from SFTP shared Paths and run various file-based jobs. The data is staged and moved to target tables, and then there are a number of materialized views that get populated, and that populating is done with ActiveBatch.

We are on-premises. We manage the servers and schedulers on a combination of Windows and Linux.

We have very strict SLAs that require us to generate reports out of the production data on a daily and weekly basis. We, as a support team, are being monitored for any SLA breaches. ActiveBatch has been very stable and has been only affected by database performance or network issues.

As the interactions between ActiveBatch and other tools are automated in the best way possible, it gives us more time to focus on other things. For any job failures or other issues, the logs generated are very easy to figure out the issue and the Root cause for the same.

ActiveBatch has been providing us with the central automation hub for scheduling, alerting, and monitoring, bringing everything together under a single pane of glass.

The REST API adapters and native integrations for integrating and orchestrating the software stack are very flexible. 

The best features in Activebatch include the API calls. These calls can be used to integrate with almost all the required components to log or action on anything.

The job scheduling feature and the templates available make a developer's life easier. We can configure any job without thinking about the skeletal system. Therefore, ActiveBatch is widely utilized and is well embedded in our company.

There are few features in alerts and monitoring where few enhancements are required in email notification declarations. Other than that, all other features are very good and have no issues.

We have faced a couple of issues where we were supposed to log a defect with ActiveBatch. That said, the Active batch Vendor Support is very responsive and reliable. We had the issues fixed within eight hours, even though they were working in a different time zone.

As this platform is very experienced and supportive, there are no issues to report.

I've used the solution for three years. 

The customer support is very reliable and responsive even though there is a difference in time zones.

Positive

We have been using ActiveBatch since I joined the company. We have had a lot of enhancements here, and everything is progressing very well.

We have implemented the solution with an in-house team.

We have connected this automation tool to our SAP ECC system. All the ECC batch jobs are scheduled via this tool.

We had configured the alerting mechanism so that whenever we have any job fails/long-running jobs, we get an immediate email notification which helps in monitoring the jobs.

The best part of the tool is the submit frame and time window where we can schedule jobs as per the customer's requirements.

As this has a quality environment, we connected this tool to ECC QA, and before making any changes to production, we are able to test the new requirements in quality then we can move to production. 

It helped to schedule and monitor the SAP ECC batch jobs.

It reduced the workload.

It can connect to a number of third-party/legacy systems. Once the job is scheduled, no manual interruption is required. Therefore, once the job is scheduled, there won't be any interruption to the job.

As we support the different countries in the project, we need to schedule jobs in different time zone; this tool helped to schedule the jobs as per the respective time zone because this tool contains almost all the time zones. We can schedule jobs as per the regional/country time.

The best feature is the alerting mechanism.

We had configured email alerts for many scenarios so that whenever a job fails/is long-running, we get an immediate email notification. There is no need to log in to the system every time and do the monitoring based on the email alert. We can inform the respective team and take action immediately. It helps to avoid business impact.

We get the best customer support; whenever we are doing any testing/facing any issues/during any new requirement, we can raise a ticket to the support team, or we can schedule a call with them so that we get an immediate response and solutions.

The monitoring dashboard could have been more user-friendly so that in the monitoring dashboard itself, we can see the total number of jobs created in the system and how many were currently active/scheduled/chained.

The reports could have more pre-defined options, such as killed/failed jobs from the current month. That way, we can get the reports quickly and help the audit process.  

Whenever any job fails in the system, it should be listed based on the priority of the job incident and should generate and assign it to the respective job owners.

I've used the solution for one to two years.

We did not use a different solution. 

The solution is easy to set up.

It offers very good value for money.

The license renewal activity is easy; the support team will provide the query we need to run it.

We use ActiveBatch Workload Automation primarily for managing work schedules.

ActiveBatch Workload Automation improved the organization I worked in because it's able to manage complex workflow automation even with a lot of cross-dependencies and hundreds of processes running. ActiveBatch Workload Automation is a very good tool in the Windows environment.

I found ActiveBatch Workload Automation to be a very good scheduling tool. What I like best about it is that it has very less downtime when managing many complex scheduling workflows, so I'm very impressed with ActiveBatch Workload Automation.

An area for improvement in ActiveBatch Workload Automation is its interface or GUI. It could be a little better.

There isn't any additional feature I'd like to see in the tool, except for the GUI, everything looks good.

I've been using ActiveBatch Workload Automation since 2009.

ActiveBatch Workload Automation has very good stability.

ActiveBatch Workload Automation is a scalable solution.

The technical support for ActiveBatch Workload Automation is very good.

We didn't use a different solution before using ActiveBatch Workload Automation.

The initial setup for ActiveBatch Workload Automation was straightforward.

Our deployment for ActiveBatch Workload Automation was done in-house.

I've seen ROI from ActiveBatch Workload Automation. It's a very good tool.

I don't have information on the licensing costs of ActiveBatch Workload Automation because a different team handles that.

We evaluated other solutions, but we went with ActiveBatch Workload Automation because it suits our environment.

I'm using version 12 of ActiveBatch Workload Automation.

Ten to fifteen people use ActiveBatch Workload Automation within the company. Between three to four people take care of the deployment and maintenance of the solution. Right now, there isn't any plan to increase the usage of ActiveBatch Workload Automation.

My advice to anyone looking to implement ActiveBatch Workload Automation is that it's a good tool for small requirements, for example, a few hundred scheduling workflows. For that, it should be a good tool, with good stability.

I'm rating ActiveBatch Workload Automation as eight out of ten.

Mainly we have used ActiveBatch for automating the deployment of different environments like production staging and QA. Earlier, we used it to have different software for each environment. This used to consume a lot of time, however, after using ActiveBatch we can manage everything under a single piece of software. The monitoring and alerting features are a great help to get complete insights and hassle-free for work. 

With the help of ActiveBatch, we have come up with cool automation starting from file transfer and pipelining the scripts with more test cases, had helped our company to grow many folds with the same resources.

Earlier, we had around four to five different tools to manage our automation which was all replaced by ActiveBatch. It is great. Even the resources required to manage those tools were reduced to a great extent and now, with only two employees, we are managing end-to-end automation. 

Our team is mainly into the automation of the entire application which usually takes around 20 minutes to complete. When ActiveBatch was used, it was done in less than five minutes. We were able to complete it before the deadlines we had and even our clients are happy with the results we produced.

Almost all the features are great. That said, if we wanted to select the best, then the monitoring feature which gives complete insights in a single dashboard is the most helpful. It helps to detect immediately if something goes wrong instead of waiting for someone to report it. 

The ROI of the application is more than what we used to spend for the entire year and its reasonable pricing has helped us to use it to its maximum. 

We are able to integrate it into multiple third-party tools like email, backup, tracking systems, SharePoint, Slack alerts, etc.

The help center and documentation are not that helpful. If we had some more user-friendly explanations and more video tutorials about how to set up and debug items, that would be ideal. 

The preset job step types make designing easy, while the steps of the job that allow scripts and code to be run allow for a wide range of additional functionality. This can be made better with more example scripts and pre-coded samples. 

If a few AI tools can be integrated with the product, it would enhance the entire product setup time and debugging issues.

I have used the solution in a previous company for more than a year. In my current company, I've been working with it for the past six months.

The product is very mature. There are a few bugs however, none of them are roadblocks. It can be resolved by some workaround.

There are no scalability issues. It easily can be used in a company with more than 1,000 employees.

They have very good customer service. We had an issue while setting up and we connected with their support team. They were able to help us and fix it on the same day. Their response time has been great.

Positive

I previously used Selenium, however, it's all bits and pieces, so we had to switch to ActiveBatch automation.

It was straightforward to set up. Only in the end, when we were importing files, did we feel a little more documentation would have been required.

We had an in-house team for the implementation. I would rate them eight out of ten.

It has helped to achieve a 20% to 30% net revenue increase in the last quarter.

Setup is easy and can be done within one or two days. The pricing is reasonable when compared to competitors. There is no need to worry about licensing as it's taken care of when you choose the plan.

Since I have worked with ActiveBatch in my previous organization, it was my go-to option. I did not evaluate others. 

Overall, it's the best product that fits perfectly to most of our use cases. That said, it can be made a little more budget-friendly.

The primary use case would be for monitoring the servers along with alerts and logs. Earlier, I had to do a lot of work on this manually and it was very time-consuming. Since the ActiveBatch Workload Automation has been implemented,  everything is smooth.

Also, we use it for job scheduling and server maintenance. This has been good. More than anything, when managing workload balance and multiple platforms, this solution helps me to avoid switching across platforms and keeps an eye on them as the tool automatically takes care of it.

Apart from this, the integrations for APIs have been very helpful as well.

Implementing this solution has been a real improvement in the work we do. This tool helps reduce the manual workload, and operational skills have been reduced as well. Now, the focus is more on developmental and deployment work.

Also, since this work has a multiplatform tool for scheduling, the jobs across platforms have been easy to handle. This has reduced a lot of micro-managing on these apps, and the amount of manual work is also reduced.

Plus, since the scalability is also automated, the team has benefitted when growing.

I use this product for multi-purpose functions. Some of the best features are:

• Workload processing
• scalability
• intelligent automation
• administration console
• workflow management
• service management
• proactive workflows
• error alerts
• service management
• job scheduling
• API integrations
• integrations
• multi-platform scheduling

Since I started using this product, I have been able to easily track everything as it mainly monitors, alerts, and looks after all the services - even across platform scheduling - which has helped me immensely.

The only issue I have is the price. It is a bit high compared to the other similar tools, yet the use case has been brilliant compared to others.

An additional feature would be the easy download of the data. I'd like to see that in this as a tool. 

Except for the GUI, everything looks good.

I have been using this product for around nine months.

The solution is very stable and dependable.

This is a good product. Since the scalability is automated, we do not have to wait on the alerts and manually increase the size.

Technical support offers great service.

Positive

I did use AWS and ServiceNow, and the switch is due to the fact that this has improved my time management very efficiently.

The initial setup was not much of an issue.

We did the implementation via an in-house team.

This solution is really worth the money.

It is worth the money; go for it.

We ask the company to please try to reduce the cost and provide it as a tool rather than a web interface. 

ActiveBatch Workload Automation is a standard scheduling tool that you have on the market. The ultimate goal is to run everything powered through ActiveBatch Workload Automation, but we are always constantly trying to move from our legacy processes, which always takes a lot of time and effort. However, all of the new processes we are focused on implementing through ActiveBatch Workload Automation.

One of the most valuable features of this solution is the versatility of the prebuilt jobs.

Any product is going to have some room for improvement, no matter what. I see the company has already ventured into AWS and they're constantly trying to improve the managed file transfer which they have recently improvised. I think they bought a software called JSCAPE and they're trying to improve it, which is good. 

I am not sure if JSCAPE would be part of the base product but currently, you have to buy a separate license for it, which doesn't make sense. If it was Microsoft, ServiceNow, or integrating with other software vendors, I would understand but JSCAPE is now in-house and I'm not sure if they can justify having a separate license for JSCAPE. I would probably expect them to be packaging JSCAPE into the base product. They did switch over from a perpetual license model to a subscription model, which hurt the company a little bit. Nobody is offering the perpetual model anymore. As long as the transition is fair for both the companies, I think it should be fine and not burn us out.

I have been using ActiveBatch Workload Automation for a few years.

ActiveBatch Workload Automation is scalable.

The scalability of the solution is good.

The technical support was difficult if you wanted to escalate the issue, it takes a little bit longer to escalate. Their service model does not allow for everybody to be on the hotline all the time. I understand that, but unfortunately, with a production system, that's what it is. If there is a bug, you want that hotline as soon as possible, because we don't know the impact of it. If it can widespread, if there is an issue, or if it's contained within one or two jobs. Luckily this has not been the case. 

It's all same architecture and framework of which you built upon several things. If there's a problem with it, you want to know it way before it impacts the other jobs.

I like ActiveBatch Workload Automation's licensing model because they're not holding you down on an agentless model or agent model, where every server needs to have an agent. That's the main selling point of the solution and I hope they stay that way.

I have evaluated other solutions, such as Control-M.

I rate ActiveBatch Workload Automation an eight out of ten.

I rated ActiveBatch Workload Automation high because the licensing model is way better than other solutions, such as Control-M or other companies that charge a lot more. I like their agentless model because most of the scheduling companies put in the rules saying, that for each server you touch, you need an agent. Otherwise, they cannot communicate, and will not work. This is a large advantage for ActiveBatch Workload Automation their Agent model is great.

We provide parking enforcement support for cities around the USA. So, if you are a municipality, then you may have a contract with us. We would provide you with services that would range from parking enforcement to tollway enforcement. It really depends on the end user and what the community's business is.

All of our automation runs through ActiveBatch. We have probably close to 2,500 jobs running each day that provide support for different municipalities around the US. All of our clients' data comes to us via a scheduled set of file movements within the arrangement of ActiveBatch. At midnight, every night, we get every ticket that a municipality issued in the last 24 hours, then we put that into our database so the municipality can ensure that they get that money collected within a reasonable length of time for collection purposes.

Each community has its own set of required rules that have to be followed, e.g., what kind of delay can happen before you make sure you collect on the debt from the citizen for having had a parking violation to when the next time you are going to go out and try to double check if they have not paid their fines.

It is deployed via our own internal network connections. It is a locally-sourced platform for us. We don't have a lot of really complex job flows. It just isn't the nature of our business, because you can't really take municipalities data someplace else. However, our data is shared in a data center in Wisconsin and a data center in Indiana, thus our data is in both locations every day.

ActiveBatch supports 250 municipalities around the USA for parking enforcement. In addition to that, there are almost another 200 that we support. They just go out and find out who owned the vehicle that had the violation, whether it be a toll road violation or a parking violation. There are a lot of moving pieces which are supported by ActiveBatch every day.

The combination of time scheduled events to running the import of data into our in-house databases is always critical, and that happens every day. Critical individual pieces for us are timed events.

ActiveBatch can automate predictable, repeatable processes very well. There is no real trick to what ActiveBatch does. ActiveBatch does exactly what you would expect a scheduling piece of software to do. It does it in a timely manner and does it with very little outside interference and fanfare. It runs when it is supposed to, and I don't have to jump through a bunch of hoops to double check it.

The reporting needs improvement. There is a real need for the ability to generate audit reports on the fly. It needs to be a lot easier than what I can do right now. This is a major item for me.

We are starting to look at doing tablet and mobile device support. An easier interface to set that up would be nice. However, at the same time, part of that is my own firm's requirements. It is not easy internally to support signing up and configuring remote access, if anything, making that easier would definitely be a plus.

We have been using ActiveBatch since 2012, and I have been part of the company since 2014. So, we have been using it for a reasonable length of time.

I find the solution very stable. 

I run jobs across two domains, all US time zones, and I have not found an issue where I couldn't run a job across a specific time zone yet. So, I think it's pretty scalable. It does what I am looking for it to do every day, and I have not found an issue where I couldn't do something. I don't have to chase after anybody to help me figure out, "How do I make the software do X, Y, and Z?"

A team of four of us, including myself, configure and monitor the software. I can't tell you how big the IT team is that supports the agents, which is how ActiveBatch runs, but there are a number of folks in that position. As a firm, we are not very big in numbers, but we respond pretty quickly if there is a problem somewhere internally that needs to be looked at and something has to be jumped on.

I find ActiveBatch very user-friendly and responsive. We are a pretty small company, as far as numbers go, and if it couldn't support what we're doing, then I would find another solution.

If I have issues with it, then Advanced Systems Concepts, Inc. (ASCI) has been very supportive with assisting us. They would jump in and help resolve the issue very quickly. They have been a joy to work with. I really haven't had any major issues with them. I have always walked away with, "Oh, here's the solution for the immediate problem." From my standpoint, that is always what I am looking for first, so I have been very happy.

I have been involved in automated scheduling software since 1989. I find this to be the easiest product that I have ever used, especially compared to Robot Schedule and CA AutoSys as well as an in-house scheduling software that I had designed and developed at one time.

I was not involved in the original setup.

We support an awful lot of clients. I look at what happens within our scheduler every morning for a review, and it is running 2,500 different workflows that probably have on average seven to eight job steps. On a normal day, I may have five that I have to worry about. If something went wrong, then I may have to rerun a job from earlier on, but that's it. There are not a lot of failures in the product.

We run an awfully lean group to accomplish all the work that we have to do. So, there is not a lot of extra time spent running a job. The job runs when it was designed to run, and that's pretty much every day. It does save us a lot of money, certainly more than doing it manually.

The decision for ActiveBatch was already in place when I joined the company, and there hasn't been any movement to go outside to some other solution.

Jump in and really look at what you are looking at, i.e. don't be afraid to question the vendor, and say, "Can it do this? Can it do that?" So, when you make the decision to use the software, you have done your due diligence and this solution will work for you. I personally think far too many people jump into the decision to buy an automated software piece without really understanding what they are asking it to do. You really have to know, "What am I looking for this software to do for me?" If you don't do that, you are probably going to find yourself unhappy at some point in time, saying, "Well, this really isn't what I thought I was getting." Then, that will end up being your own fault: The more effort you put in ahead of time, the better off you're going to be. Know ahead of time, "What am I going after here that will work for me?"

I may not know when a client municipality is going to deliver a file to us. So, a lot of our jobs run as events, not by time. In other words, it may run at three o'clock tomorrow morning or may not run until five o'clock the next morning, because the municipality wasn't ready to send us the data yet. It is a combination of what we have scheduled, as opposed to what we react to when a file is delivered to us.

I would rate this solution as an eight and a half (out of 10).

Primarily, we've been using it in a localized way, but it's becoming more and more of an enterprise tool as the knowledge is shared throughout the team and department. But primarily it has been used for ETL-type work. My team is data integration and we use it to schedule our Informatica PowerCenter workflows as well as DataStage. We also use it for a lot of file transfers, such as SFTP stuff. And we've recently explored some API calls that we can use to interface with Qlik.

It's really helpful with scheduling and setting up dependencies. I primarily use it with our data warehouse and there are a lot of dependencies. First you have to load XYZ tables before it's filtered and presented in the reporting layer. It really helps to maintain those constraints and dependencies.

We use it to schedule our data warehouse. We use the Informatica PowerCenter tool and we have Oracle's out-of-the-box Data Warehouse so there are a lot of workflows that need to run, either sequentially or that are dependent on one another. ActiveBatch really handles hundreds of workflows on a schedule and it definitely maintains those constraints. I've never seen a failure to trigger a job at an appropriate time. We definitely rely on it heavily in that regard.

ActiveBatch was originally purchased as a scheduler, to enable us to execute DataStage jobs, but once we started to grow, and our use cases started to vary, we realized that we could use the pre-built SFTP capabilities. Previously, we had to code things in our DataStage tool where it wasn't as intuitive. You really had to get into the programming. But a business user can certainly use ActiveBatch to set up an SFTP connection, as long as they have the information. It's pretty easy to do that. Moving SFTP files around is certainly valuable to the business because I work for a hospital. The health system is definitely reliant on the data that we move around, and ActiveBatch really executes the ETL workflows that actually transform and move the data. We rely on it to appropriately schedule and execute those workflows to get the data to the right place.

The solution has become our center of excellence for all things related to automation in our organization. We started with DataStage and then we acquired the Informatica tool and we use ActiveBatch for that. Now we're seeing we can use the scheduling capabilities of ActiveBatch to call our Qlik refresh applications. We're starting to expand ActiveBatch as an enterprise solution and other departments are also finding that they can do all the remote scripting that they used to have to do manually, or that operations would have to do, in ActiveBatch and it will take care of that on a schedule, instead of wasting man-hours.

It also provides proactive error detection, even in real time. Almost all of our workflows have a lot of notifications set up to either email, or page, or create a ServiceNow ticket if there is a failure. We're notified immediately if something's not working as it should. That has prevented problems from becoming fires. If we didn't get those notifications, if our data warehouse was not operating as we expected it to, that certainly would cause some problems. 

In addition, in terms of workflow completion times, I don't know what we would have done without it, as far as scheduling goes. It would probably be a lot more complicated to schedule a lot of our workflows through these other products that are more focused on the data manipulation and are not as concerned with scheduling. So to be able to schedule and set up dependencies has been pretty valuable for us. It has improved our workflow completion rates by five hours per day, because we execute our workflows daily. It has also reduced our man-hours by something like 60 percent. It has a lot of intuitive stuff so that instead of building out code for it, we can just plug-and-play with it. You put in the right parameters and it takes care of it for you.

We have definitely been able to re-assign staff to more value-added activities as a result of using ActiveBatch. Something that has been very valuable for us is that we have been able to build our solutions in a way that, if they fail, ActiveBatch actually tries to restart them itself, without any manual intervention. If that fails it goes to our operations team. Before, that was something that our ETL or data integration team had to handle ourselves. Being able to push those issues to ActiveBach and to the other team, it has really saved us a lot of time.

We do a lot of very specific scheduling. You could do it as simply as, "Hey, run this every day at six o'clock," or you could do something like an exact date and exclude bank holidays. It has a very robust scheduling aspect.

We use a lot of SFTP stuff. With version 11 and version 12 they came out with a managed file transfer. They have a lot of pre-programmed "job steps" so that you don't have to develop custom code. You can just say, "Copy file. SFTP file." They build up a lot of the common uses that you would be looking to develop yourself.

We leverage the solution's native integrations regularly. We have to get files from a remote server outside the organization, and even send things outside the organization. We use a lot of its file manipulation and SFTP functionality for contacting remote servers. 

ActiveBatch also has a lot of pre-built looping structures, reading files, looping-if-branch; basic programming concepts are pre-built for you and robust. That's definitely nice.

It's very easy to use. I was self-taught before any training was available for our company. It's very easy to learn to use yourself. I have a technical background but even some of our business users, with some light training, would be able to navigate and use the tool very easily. Things like the copy files or move files are very intuitive.

It's extremely flexible. In addition to that pre-built functionality and the ability to create API calls, it allows us to create our own service library. That wasn't default but they said "Hey, we have this package where you can build your own library." It also has some different scripting of job steps. If I want to use PowerShell to achieve something that might not be out-of-the-box, I've been able to leverage that utility to achieve whatever we're looking to do. If there's a problem that needs a solution that may not be available in our ETL products, my first go-to is ActiveBatch to do some scripting.

Between version 10 and version 12 there was a change. In version 10, they had each object in its own folder. But on the back end, they saw it at the root level. So when we moved over to version 12, everything was in the same area mixed together. It was incredibly difficult and we actually had to create our own folders and move those objects—like schedules, jobs, user accounts—and manually put those into folders, whereas the previous version already had it. They did allow us to filter so that we could see things, but that was not nearly as effective as what we had become used to having.

I've been using ActiveBatch Workload Automation for three years.

It's very stable. Any of the issues that we tend to see are related to the product that ActiveBatch is trying to talk to. For example, we use the web service for our Informatica tool, and issues we see are on the PowerCenter side, not the ActiveBatch side.

I know it has features for scaling, so as we continue to build it out as an enterprise tool we're able to use what they call a Virtual Root. The team using it doesn't see everybody else's work, they only see what's relevant to them. That's really neat. 

We went from one team using it to some four or five teams using it now. The other teams are just starting, but I don't see any collisions. It's easy to grow.

We have about 30 users of the solution, including developers, solution architects, operations, trainers, administrators, and data modelers.

Their support is good. For every support question I've raised they've had very responsive teams. To date, we haven't submitted an issue that they haven't been able to correct or provide some sort of solution for.

Before ActiveBatch, as they created jobs, they used our DataStage tool as the scheduler. That functionality was within the product.

I was involved in the deployment of the current version. We originally had version 10, but within the last year we upgraded to version 12 and I played a role in that. From my perspective as a user of the application, it was very seamless, especially moving our existing workflows. We needed to keep them running on the new version and the backward compatibility was spot-on.

That upgrade process took about three months but that was not a dedicated, focused effort. There were a lot of other variables.

I would recommend taking the time to understand the different objects and features so that, as you grow as an enterprise, the architecture is already in place and you're not figuring it out as you go, like we did.

The ability to automate predictable, repeatable processes is something that we haven't leveraged as much. It's the Heuristic Queue Allocation where it can schedule and manage execution of workflows with whatever resource is available. With that said, I do notice that it does track, by default, the average run time and how long jobs run. There are some default analytics that it provides.