ActiveBatch by Redwood Reviews

ActiveBatch helps in scheduling the job processes in a great manner and also helps in executing various tasks. The tasks can be related to data processing, file transfers, or system management. 

It arranges all the complex tasks in the correct order and looks after the dependencies of tasks on one another. This is very useful for businesses involving many or multiple systems. 

The tool facilitates integration between various other databases, systems, or applications. Integrated systems work together very smoothly. ActiveBatch provides a real-time analysis and monitoring feature that ensures that users are informed of any issues in the automated execution process.

ActiveBatch Workload Automation is truly a powerful tool when it comes to automation. The way we manage work has completely changed after using this tool. 

Execution of workflows has become smooth and simple. The overall result after using ActiveBatch at our organization is fabulous. The business processes have improved more than ever before. 

The user interface is really incredible. It is easy to use even with limited technical expertise. This tool allows us to create any type of complex workflow with ease. 

Built-in job steps and integrations are some of the best features of ActiveBatch. This single feature has saved a lot of time for me. Real-time monitoring ensures that the user is aware of the status of the workflows. 

ActiveBatch has strong security and access control options. We can easily define who can access and modify the automation processes. 

It ensures that data is safe from intruders. It makes sure that there is no data leakage during the automation process. The tool has an exceptional documentation and support team. 

The customer team is always responsive and they are available to resolve any type of issues faced by the users. The documentation is very well-organized and it helps the users to find answers to any of their questions without taking any other help. 

This powerful tool has saved us a lot of time and resources. This is a feature-rich solution that delivers outstanding results.

Providing some detailed training materials could be very helpful for new users who have very limited technical information about the tool. 

Enhancing the features of cybersecurity could be of great use. Scalability and adapting to the changing demands can be improved. The user interface can be enhanced so that it can be accessible to beginners. Providing customizable dashboards and tools can be helpful. 

Integration with other platforms can be improved. Allowing users to create their own custom job steps can be of great use.

I have been using this automation tool for the past nine months.

The scalability it provides is fabulous and reliable.

I switched to this automation tool due to the fact that ActiveBatch had all the features I was looking for. The automation process was smooth and error-free with ActiveBatch. This saved a lot of time and resources and has improved the overall performance.

ActiveBatch Workload Automation enables us to automate and manage a wide range of business processes. 

It helps in automating complex workflows that may involve multiple tasks. The platform provides a smooth integration between various other systems, applications, and their databases. 

It is best suited for hybrid IT environments. 

ActiveBatch provides robust job scheduling capabilities. It allows the users to schedule and execute the tasks at specific times. The platform ensures that tasks are assigned to the respective resources efficiently. 

Error Handling is one of the best standout features of ActiveBatch.

ActiveBatch Workload Automation has truly been a transformative solution for my organization. 

It has completely changed the work environment. It has made work much easier and faster. The time taken by the tasks to get executed has gradually decreased over time. 

Managing the complex workflows and arranging the job processes has become easier. The platform handles a wide range of automation tasks, ranging from simple job scheduling processes to complex processes. 

The integration capabilities and reliability of the software are exceptional. 

The built-in templates have been of great help in speeding up the automation processes.

ActiveBatch's integration capabilities are impressive. It can connect smoothly with various other systems. It ensures that data flows smoothly between the systems. This has improved the overall data accuracy. 

The reporting and monitoring features have been a game-changer as it helps to keep track of the job status. This helps in identifying the issues and resolving them as soon as possible. This ensures that the task execution runs smoothly without any interruptions. 

The way ActiveBatch handles and adapts to the changing demand is remarkable.

The user interface can be improved so that it is more appealing and accessible to new users. 

Enhancing the debugging tools can help users to identify the issues more effectively. 

Improved mobile access can enable us to monitor and handle workflows with ease. 

Machine Learning features can be added in the future and offering advanced customization could be of great help. 

Pricing of the product can be made transparent so that new users can get an idea about the operational costs associated with the product.

I have been using ActiveBatch Workload Automation for the past seven months.

The overall scalability provided by ActiveBatch is great.

I switched from a previously used solution to a more modern automation solution like ActiveBatch due to the fact that the features in ActiveBatch were more advanced and it helped me resolve all the issues. 

The previous automation tool could not adapt to the changing requirements. With ActiveBatch, the work has become truly exceptional.

In terms of ROI, ActiveBatch has given significant value to the organization. There have been reduced operational costs and improved efficiency. It has allowed us to allocate the resources more wisely.

I'd advise users to start by knowing what the actual requirement is and thoroughly assess the automation needs. New users should take advantage of the demos and trial versions so they get an idea of the platform.

Most of the jobs are for the automation of processes, but we also use it for IT operations, including monitoring. We execute over 20,000 jobs daily.

It's moving data files and doing a lot of calculations in hydrology and the like. The business users are maintaining their own jobs, setting them up, configuring, and maintaining them. They only contact us, in IT,  if there are any problems. 

ActiveBatch is completely on-prem but the rest of our organization has many different kinds of infrastructure and locations, both in the cloud and in 16 countries. We have about 4,000 employees.

The automation has saved us many hours although I can't say exactly how many.

We're able to create workflows without coding.

I would imagine it has also resulted in an improvement in workflow completion times as well.

Our IT organization is using it for monitoring. We get information by running checks using ActiveBatch to obtain information to provide to the monitoring systems. It helps us keep systems up and to receive early warning about problems.

We use the main job-scheduling feature. It's the only thing we use in the tool. That's the reason we are using the tool: to reduce costs by replacing manual tasks with automated tasks and to perform regular, repetitive tasks in a more reliable way.

It's quite customizable because it supports many different platforms and technologies, and it covers almost everything we need to set up different jobs in our environment. We are using it mostly for our Windows and Unix servers and we are using different triggers, for example, Apache ActiveMQ. It is used by many different applications and systems. We use various databases, including Oracle, SQL Server, Microsoft, as well as Active Directory.

We are at the beginning of implementing agents in our Azure cloud. We haven't used that part very much yet but it will be used. We are moving more and more systems from on-prem to the cloud, so it will increase gradually.

It could be easier to provide dashboards on how many jobs are running at the same time; more monitoring.

We've been using ActiveBatch for at least 10 years. We're on version 11 but we are planning to upgrade to version 12 in a couple of months. 

I'm not an end-user, I'm just responsible for making sure it's working. I troubleshoot if something is wrong and I do upgrading and installing.

It's pretty reliable. If it's organized and configured in an optimal way it works pretty well, but it requires a lot of planning. For example, you have to make sure that end-users don't have too many privileges because they can mess things up. It's very important to plan carefully before implementing.

We have had some issues in one of our installations in Germany, but they are still on version 10, which is quite an old implementation. They will replace that with the new version 12 in the near future.

The scalability is quite good. You can add more agents. We haven't had any performance problems or issues with it.

The number of jobs and the number of applications that take advantage of ActiveBatch are growing constantly within our company. 

Other than scheduling in Windows, I don't think our company had a previous solution.

ActiveBatch was already implemented when I came to this company, but I have been here for a couple of upgrades.

Some parts of the setup are straightforward and some parts are more complex. The main features are pretty straightforward to set up but when it comes to the features that require an internet information server, it's a bit more tricky to set the secure connections and certificates, etc. We struggled a bit with that but we had good support from the vendor. They were able to make it work.

The implementation itself doesn't take a long time, but it takes a lot of planning: Security, execution agents, and the like. 

There are two of us who work with ActiveBatch maintenance, but it's not a full-time responsibility. We have between 100 and 200 people who transact with it. Some of them have read-only access so that they can view the jobs.

I also have experience with CA Workload Automation. It has been some years since I worked with it but it's the same concept and the same features but doing things in slightly different ways. 

Start with a simple, small version and try some simple tasks to see how effective it is.

Using  ActiveBatch I have learned that the potential for reducing costs using an automation tool is huge, and that when the business becomes aware of it they really embrace the product.

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.

In our company we deal with a lot of data processing. Clients will send us extract files that we load into our system so that we can run calculations. And all of that is orchestrated using ActiveBatch automation. To summarize, we have software that we use to calculate values, but we need to receive the files from the client, get them to the right spot, and get them ready for processing. All of those steps are done using the automation tool.

The integrations we mainly use it with are FTP and SQL and we use a batch file or a script file to call our internal programs. It does have the ability to call PowerShell scripts and we do use some of those. We just don't have a need to use a lot of PowerShell because most of our software is designed using a different language.

The biggest example of the way it has improved things — and this is actually why we moved to ActiveBatch — is that most of our jobs are our processes that run overnight. That's the critical time for us because we have to load and calculate this data overnight so that the clients can have it in the morning. Our old automation tool would frequently have jobs that just failed, with no reason given. It would not track the history, so there was no way to determine if there was a pattern of failure. And it was difficult to restart jobs. That's what moved us to ActiveBatch: knowing that the job is going to run, and that if it does fail it's going to give adequate information as to why it failed. Typically, any failure in our case is data-related or due to code on our side. Rarely has it ever been an issue with ActiveBatch itself. Having that stability, especially doing our overnight processing, is the biggest benefit to our business from using ActiveBatch.

If you're a programmer, you can certainly write out scripts and design jobs that are similar to programs. But a lot of our technicians who use it do not have a programming background, and it's simply a matter of using the templates that are already provided. You do not have to have any kind of programming background to be able to use the software. 

While we've never had a whole lot of scripting done, even with our old tool, with ActiveBatch it's very easy to have junior employees log into the system. They can learn how to create jobs. It's definitely something that's accessible by more junior level employees, as well as senior level.

It also has the capability for event-driven automation to trigger workflows based on specific emails, file events, FTP file triggers, message queues, date database modifications, tweets, etc. For us, the big one is a file trigger, when a file arrives on our FTP server in a certain location. We'll occasionally use a database trigger as well. And we use the scheduling capability that it has to run a job at a certain date and time. These abilities have definitely increased efficiency and reduced delays. It's mainly from the stability of the automation. Even with the old software, it had that same capability, but it just wasn't as reliable. It would just have odd failures that we never could quite explain, and the vendor could not either. ActiveBatch, having that stability and being able to use those triggers to automatically trigger our jobs and get them running overnight, greatly enhances our efficiency. Having a team manually do those things would take much longer.

I don't know if I could quantify the improvement in job success rate percentage, but when I joined this particular department it was right around the time that the transition was being made from the old automation to ActiveBatch. What I do know is that there were enough failures and instability in the old automation tool to trigger moving to a new tool, which is ActiveBatch. Since then, we have not had those types of issues. It's very reliable and very stable which is exactly what we need. 

I would think there has been improvement in workflow completion times, just from the stability standpoint. The way we create and use jobs in ActiveBatch is similar to what we did before. If everything worked as designed, I imagine that the old tool and ActiveBatch would probably process things in the same timeframe. It's just that ActiveBatch is much more stable. There aren't as many failures. The speed factor, for what we use it for, would probably be similar with any automation tool because we use it for such straightforward, simple tasks. Based on all the other performance indicators, I would imagine it's just as fast, if not faster than other tools.

Because we're a pretty small company, using a tool like this doesn't necessarily reduce headcount, but it allows us to not have to add headcount.

We mostly use the fairly straightforward features of the solution:

• copying and moving files from one location to another
• FTP processes to send and receive files 
• database queries to update certain data elements. 

It's nothing super-complex, but these are things we would not be able to do manually without adding a lot more time to the process.

It's also very easy to restart jobs at a certain point, in the event of a failure. Things like that are things that we didn't want to have with some of our former automation tools: overall ease of use.

In addition, you can go to one screen and see every job that is currently running and what the status of that job is. You can scroll up or down and see jobs that ran in the past jobs and jobs that are scheduled to run in the future. It makes it easier to monitor jobs. A lot of our processes run overnight. We have a team that monitors the automation jobs to make sure everything's running and to correct any failures that may happen. They are able to easily see the status of everything using ActiveBatch, without having to click on multiple jobs to see an individual status. They can get a summary of it on the summary view.

It's pretty customizable, from what I can tell. We haven't had a need to customize a lot of things because most of what we do is pretty straightforward. But you can script out a PowerShell script and use some of the internal functions and features of  ActiveBatch within the script. You could, theoretically, customize it pretty extensively. We just haven't had a need to do that very much.

The only thing is that it does have a little bit of a learning curve because it is fairly complex. You have to learn how it does things. I don't know if it's any worse than any other tool would be, just because of the nature of what it does. Like many things, you learn how to do something initially and then, a year or two later, you might find a better way to do it and you have to adjust how you did it before. So the learning curve is the hardest part. Even then isn't bad, because any tool is going to have that type of learning curve. 

We're migrating to version 12 and I know they've made a lot of improvements that can help with navigating that application. I expect that would improve it.

We started migrating to ActiveBatch around 2012 so we've been using it for about eight years. We are currently on version 10 with plans to upgrade soon to version 12.

We've never run into any bandwidth issues, but we're also a pretty small company. The number of jobs that we run is much smaller than a larger company would run. We've talked with other companies that use ActiveBatch and they have far more jobs running concurrently than we do. They have never expressed any issue with bandwidth either. 

From my experience, it seems like it's very scalable. You can create jobs in a manner that they can be reused for multiple clients, using variables. We've never had any issue with the number of concurrent jobs running.

ActiveBatch is running around 300 jobs for us. As our company grows, we'll use it more and more. It's integral to our processing that we have built our business around. As we get more and more clients, we will be using and creating more and more jobs. Eventually, we'll probably need to add additional resources to help with that. It's as scalable as our company is.

Their support is excellent. If we run into any issue, and we can't find a solution on the forums, we'll create a ticket with them and we'll get a response very quickly, especially compared to some of our other vendors. They've always been able to help out and find a solution or answer to our questions, which is great.

Our previous solution was AutoMate BPA. 

We switched because we needed stability. We also needed something that was easy to use where we could have certain functionality, like restarting jobs from different points and reusing steps for multiple clients. Those were things we just did not have in the old tool. Having that stability and the ability to see if a job failed and having adequate log information to indicate why it failed are the biggest reasons why we moved over.

The technician who researched solutions and found ActiveBatch was the guiding force as far as getting it installed, set up, and configured. So I don't have a lot of experience with that side of it. I've mostly been designing how jobs should work and be built. The setup seemed like it was straightforward from what I could tell. I don't think it was super-difficult.

It took us a good year or two to fully convert all of our jobs to ActiveBatch. But that was because we had a large number of jobs that were in the old tool and we had to be careful about adjusting things that are in a production environment. We spaced it out a while to get everything converted.

Our implementation strategy was mostly looking at which clients had more complex jobs and which clients had simpler jobs, so that we could start with the simpler ones as we were getting our feet wet using the tool. Then it was just scheduling out which clients would be converted when and creating the jobs to mirror what we already had in the other tool. It was nothing too complicated.

We have definitely seen ROI. It's a critical component of how we do things now. It has definitely been worth everything we've paid so far, and more.

From what I recall, the price was fairly in line with other automation tools. I don't think it's exorbitantly expensive, relatively speaking. It's definitely been worth every penny for us. It hasn't been the case that we have thought, "Oh, it's too expensive. We need to find something else." It's worth it for us, by a large margin.

In addition to the licensing fee, I believe there is a cost for how many different agents you need to put on servers. There's some additional licensing that you can get, that we haven't had a need for, where you can add jobs that work with VMware or other third-party tools, to open up that part of it.

One of our other technicians was the lead on finding a new automation tool. Along with ActiveBatch, he found three or four others that he thought might have good potential. I was on a few calls where they were demoing the software, and there wasn't really anything that fit for us as well as ActiveBatch did.

Take the time to get a good feel for how it works. That's the biggest thing. Once you have that, start creating the jobs. I would expect that people will be very satisfied with how well it runs and the flexibility that the tool has.

In terms of execution on hybrid machines or across on-prem and cloud systems, it's not applicable for us at this point. All our stuff is hosted. We're not doing anything in the cloud right now, although that may be something that's in our future. But right now, it's just used for servers that we have in our data center.

We have a team of about six or seven people who use ActiveBatch at least a little bit. But only three of us are the "power users." ActiveBatch is designed to have different roles but all three of us do a little bit of all of them. So we haven't divided it out yet in terms of having an operations person or a design person. My role leans more toward designing jobs. The technician that found ActiveBatch, his role leans more towards the operation and administrative side of getting things installed and working on upgrading the application. The third guy does a little of both.

We're pretty satisfied with everything. Their support is great. It does everything we need it to do. There isn't anything that we're having to find workarounds for.