Automic Automation Reviews

I mainly use this solution for batch job processing.

The most valuable features are the predefined templates for application-specific jobs and the access for different users.

The interface could be made more user-friendly in terms of job creation and scheduling, especially when doing bulk job creation and modification. Drag and Drop to create conditions dependency between jobs

I've been using this solution for three years.

This solution is stable.

This solution is scalable.

It can be very difficult to reach the support team, and they don't have support available in all locations, so you sometimes have to wait to hear back.

Positive

The initial setup was very straightforward and quick.

The implementation was done in-house using cloud automation, which provides the functionality to upgrade or install the agent and clients.

This solution is pretty well-priced. I would rate its pricing as four out of five.

Automic Workload Automation is a good, clear automation tool that's reasonably priced. I would rate it seven out of ten.

This solution has many use cases because it's automation, so the sky is the limit. It can be useful for any workloads—DD operation, disaster recovery, data center automation—required by the customer. 

This solution is deployed on-prem. 

The most valuable features are its robustness, it's highly scalable, and it's easy to implement. 

This solution's out-of-box automation sets could be improved. They could be industry standardized out-of-box, or even runbook automation processes could be useful—just some plug-and-play automation processes out-of-box. It has many integration capabilities, from APIs to databases, but if the customer sees some out-of-box automation processes in it, it could be useful. 

As for additional features, a best practices library could be good. Also, maybe more technology connectors, in order to connect and run the automation, so more out-of-box integration points. 

We have been dealing with Automic for around three years. 

This solution is highly scalable. In our country, we have more than 30 customers using this solution. 

I would rate support an eight out of ten. From a customization point of view, it requires some technical knowledge. 

The installation is very straightforward. The time it will take depends on the implementation and the size of the project—it can range from one day to five days. A team of one to three people could be enough for deployment. 

We implement this solution for clients. 

They have changed the pricing on their licensing, and it's cheaper than before. 

I rate Automic Workload Automation a nine out of ten. I recommend this solution to others. 

We have several corporate solutions that need to be integrated with our ITSM products.

Automic facilitates integration to ensure the correct execution of ITIL process workflows. The first was to create service offerings for provisioning virtual machines in both private and public cloud environments.

The creation of virtual machines would have to contemplate the current process of changes, releases, and configurations. Our service catalog should make service offerings available; these involved diverse operating systems, different hardware configurations, and some functioning web services.

An approval process would also be contemplated, where the main steps would be the registration and closing of the change tickets, as well as the registration and deactivation of the generated configuration items.

We have several solutions, but we opted for Automic following the natural evolution of CA Process Automation. The fact that it has native integration with ITSM solutions was also an important factor in the decision. Due to the various possible integrations, all of them need to be in accordance with the ITIL process. This would facilitate the actions that would come in order to implement a DevOps culture in the organization.

The service support is acceptable and response times are fast, whether from the manufacturer itself or from partners.

Due to the fact that we have several solutions to be integrated into the ITSM processes, the possibility of having multiple client areas is important because it favors organizing integrations and automations.

We have other products from Broadcom (CA Technologies) in operation, and integration with these products was very smooth. It integrates easily with CA Service Desk Manager, CA Service Catalog and CA Process Automation, and more.

Adding that to the various packages and plugins available at Marketplace, the learning curve to make automation work was very fast.

We found that some Actions Packs and plugins do not have documentation, are incomplete, or are of poor quality. In most of the packages available, it took time to study and gain knowledge of the features and resources due to poor documentation. This time could be reduced if the documentation was more complete.

If the documentation is not well built, there will always be extra time for testing and some of these generate doubts that turn a simple job into something complex. With the project's schedules in progress, it is difficult to set deadlines, even if they are adjusted for more.

I have been using Automic Workload Automation for two years.

The product demonstrates excellent stability, regardless of whether the installation has high availability or not. We have not seen any problems in this regard.

It is a product that scales easily, but with a short aggregate in its version with high availability.

The most experienced support team is international. Some professionals at the time of implantation are no longer available. The service responds quickly to doubts and so far we have had no difficulties in this regard.

We have also used CA Process Automation, MS System Center Orchestrator, and Control-M.

Complexity only exists when installing high availability. Support from the manufacturer was required.

It was through a Broadcom partner. The team was very experienced in the product, including with use cases in a company in the same area in which our organization operates.

We don't have enough time to calculate ROI yet, but we are optimistic.

There are different licensing fees for cases where high availability is important. There is also a certain complexity in this type of installation.

We only evaluated Broadcom (CA Technologies) products.

Overall, the user experience is extremely good. The monitoring and troubleshooting features are rich and with the dashboards and other features, automation work is made easier.

We are working with telecoms to automate workloads. The use cases include automation from inception to activation. Some use cases also deal with professional services.

Our use cases are reflected in the cloud-based Workload Automation.

The ease of deployment makes it easier when it comes to the development and testing of the automations.

It integrates well with the CICD pipeline.

We would like a way to test our cloud-based automations on-premises, and then migrate them to the cloud after they have been tested, without needing an additional license. As developers, this would help us.

In the future, I would like to see a system where each developer works on their own changes, and they are submitted to a controller. At that point, the controller has the option to accept or reject changes from each of the developers.

I have been working with Automic Workload Automation for about four years.

I use many tools in combination with this product including Jenkins, GitHub, and GitLab.

This is a very stable product and personally, I have not had any issues with it. Our vision includes continuing to use it in the future.

Automic Workload Automation is scalable. I have experience with larger companies in different regions and I can say that a high number of IT staff, between 70% and 85% use automation tools.

For this product specifically, there are between 40 and 45 users.

Personally, I do not have experience with technical support. However, I think people in our team have been in contact with them.

We did not have a plan to adopt this product and didn't even discover it right away. Rather, we followed the new technologies and came up with new strategies that led us to it.

The initial setup is easy.

The first time we installed it, the process took between 30 and 45 minutes. After that, we replicated the installation and to deploy it takes no more than 10 minutes.

My team is responsible for the deployment. One person is enough for the task. For the implementation from end-to-end, it should take between six and twelve hours.

There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

This is absolutely a product that I recommend.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We are a system integrator and Automic is one of the workload automation products that we implement for our clients.

This tool provides a great versatility of options for effective digital business automation. Integration with different platforms, ERP systems, business application, microservices, big data.

We are supporting multiple customers and their environments. Some of the most common uses are : SAP, SAP BW, Avaloq, FileTransfers, FTP/SFTP, Datastage, Informatica

It has its own scripting language which allows you to be even more flexible with the objects and create your own unique environment. You can easily have a single object with smartly defined parameters (variables) and reuse that object in many different workflows, passing different values to achieve different purposes. 

The vendor support is really bad and should be improved. The engineers taking our vendor tickets are not knowledgeble enough of the product and occasionally not helpful at all. Tickets usally are bouncing back and forth with very little helpful information or investigation from their side for a issue we are experiencing/reporting.

I have been working with Automic Workload Automation for at least five years.

This is a stable product and we plan on continuing to use it in the future.

Automic Workload Automation is scalable, although it can improve on the database side. When it comes to workload automation tools, the database is always at the back of the list.

My team has approximately 25 people in it, and we have teams in America and Germany as well.

The technical support is slow, and the people that take the cases are not really familiar with the product. Most of their answers are simply "Did you check the official documentation? Did you check the knowledge base articles?"

If we are at the point that we are asking for support, most times, we would have already checked everything place that we can.

Basically, they should be faster and more knowledgeable.

In our team, we are using four workload automation tools including Automic, Control-M, Autosys, and TWS/IWS. We are supporting all of them but I concentrate on Automic because it's the one that I like the most.

The initial setup is straightforward. It is pretty easy to install this product anywhere, regardless of whether it is an on-premises or cloud-based deployment. Usually, deployment takes four hours at the most.

I have done the deployment several times, myself.

This is a good product and I can recommend it.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We are a reseller and solution provider, and this is one of the products that we provide for our customers.

This is a conversion product, and we use this solution to assist customers who are converting from another product. Our primary focus is one-for-one migration, bringing it up to the next level and getting it ready for the next phase.

This solution saves our organization time, in terms of management. It is also more systematic and gives us more control. It is easy to learn.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the scheduler.

The workflow is object-oriented.

The source code is centralized, rather than being deployed to the individual servers.

There are always ways that technical support can be improved.

I would like to see more types of Calendars in the next release of this solution.

In terms of stability, so far so good. We have not encountered any bugs in this solution.

Our proposal matches the average, so we have not needed the solution to grow.

The plan is to increase usage once this solution is stabilized. We are hoping that this is in the near future.

I have worked with technical support, and we are pretty happy with them. The response time is long, but they have been ok so far.

Prior to this, we used other products from the CA Automation family, but with different branding. We used the AutoSys d-Series Edition.

With respect to migration or conversion projects, the compilation is done with a conversion factory. This is done on-site, and after that, there is testing and production. The deployment time for a project is between three and six months.

Many of the things are handled by the CA Compilation team. We are on-site, assisting the technical team. We migrate across from the remote site to the client site.

There is a lot of coordination that has to be done with the customer. The environment, including the data, has to be ready.

Two or three people are required, on-site, for the deployment. One of them is an architect and two of them are engineers.

Once this solution is deployed, the customer takes over the operation, including the maintenance.

When our customers have a lot of manual processes, the automation will reduce the number of human errors that occur. This will reduce the cost.

I began using this product just after it was acquired by CA. We have four to five people who have been trained on CA Workload Automation across all of the developing nations.

My advice to anybody who is implementing this solution is to carefully look at the environment. Some manual processes can be converted, but some are best left done using human manual input. If this is the case then you have to convert these into a scripted document image.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.

We are currently doing a migration from Dollar U to ONE Automation for 815 applications for one of our clients.

We have used ONE Automation to make a platform for one of our clients using two clustered Oracle Databases and web services, with an Automation Engine. 

We made another platform for backup using Data Guard and two web services with two Automation Engines and one Oracle Database, so if there is a problem with the first platform, functionality can pass directly to the second platform.

I have found new methods for converting scripts from Dollar U to ONE Automation. For example, I take the dynamic library from Dollar U and put it in the dynamic binary library in ONE Automation. This enables us to use Dollar U scripts in ONE Automation.

It's easy for integration, not like BMC Control-M. It's clear when there are errors or bugs. We can just go to the logs and read the error code and find what needs to be done.

There were many bugs in the last version. For example, we could only use capital letters for searching for agent names. Also, we had a problem with ONE Automation where we couldn't use the PGA and SGA in Oracle Databases for resolving RAM because the last version didn't have this capability.

We can use ONE Automation with many other applications like ServiceNow and Jenkins. This is the scalability for me, that there are many possibilities with this tool. We can use it with many other technologies. It is really good.

The company where we are doing this work is looking at expanding into banking, and that would happen in many countries. Of course, this would give us more work with Automic Workload Automation. The objective is that all applications for this client are within ONE Automation.

I do not contact CA technical support but my colleague does for many bugs and other security and system requirements. We need to change many things in our platform for security needs. We open cases with ONE Automation to help us with the skills for integration, development, and administration. Tech support has been helpful.

I used Dollar U. There are really big differences. Dollar U has decentralized methods and tools. ONE Automation has centralized tools. It is really strong and really easy to use ONE Automation. For example, for organizing, for creating applications and clients, for manipulating the agents, for the servers, it's really easy. You just put the agent in the server application with the LI and it directly connects with the Automation Engine Server. It's amazing.

The initial setup required us to do an analysis of the Dollar U environment for conversion to ONE Automation. We have special tools for converting the session and the UPROCs from Dollar U to jobs and workflow in ONE Automation. We have developed macros with VBA to convert all the information in Dollar U to ONE Automation.

When we start an integration for the first time, we create the client and we attach the agent for the application, because every application is a "client" for us. We use Red Hat Servers for this. Of course, we use Windows servers, but 80 percent are Red Hat as well as iX and HPE servers.

Each application takes a different amount of time. For example, there are applications for factoring or financial applications. We need one year for their implementation. Smaller applications take a few months. We start with the small applications and then move to the more difficult applications. We have a team working on this and every person has ten or 15 applications to do.

You should know configuration and scripting in Shell because Automic only gives binary, which you can adapt for your environment. You can the Automic with PostgreSQL, but it's not good. I prefer to use it with Oracle Database and to use clusters to create a solid environment.

I have installed many packages, such as for WebSphere, for chat bots, for SSH, and for using programs like Excel, and Word. I'm trying to learn many things about development with ONE Automation.

It's a good tool, really strong. It needs some new features, it needs to evolve, but it's really good. I really like it. And now, with Broadcom in the picture, it's a strong company.

We use it for assisted process change, and we are using it for basic operating system-level UPROCs or jobs, and there are certain jobs that it runs for the net backup.

The solution has been here for the past ten years, there is a definite business value-add; the batch/shell scripts running in the environment can be controlled centrally, SAP Processing; Backup Jobs and many more with no or minimal interventions.

In general, in any environment where there are more than 500 or 600 servers, each server will have settings and scripts doing their jobs, moving files, etc. There may be a bunch of scripts that run in a workflow. If you don't have a centralized tool for workload automation, it becomes problematic down the line because, as the environment grows, as IT grows in any organization, the number of scripts grows accordingly. If you have a centralized workload automation tool, you can completely control such jobs, or file transfers, or any job that is critical to a specific application/server. So it provides ease in handling scripts.

Also, it helps with manpower. If you have server admins to take care of those scripts, you need more admins, of course. But if you have one such workload automation tool, a single person can control, monitor, and see the behavior of the scripts in the environment: How well they are running and, if they are failing, which scripts are failing. That's the business value-add that I see in having any workload automation tool, like CA Dollar Universe, which is the one we have here.

The most valuable feature is the one for SAP batch processing. It's not just ordinary job processing. There are certain other mid-level workload automation tools which can handle the OS level, but SAP is something which is really very critical. Automic stands out from the ordinary tools because handling SAP processes is absolutely easy with it. Integrating SAP applications with Dollar U is very easy. It's just a few considerations and there you go. You can initiate your processing.

We are currently at version 6.7.41. One improvement area that I can see would be a centralized licensing part. I've heard that has been already taken care of in the latest version. I'm not sure how true that is, but that's one thing that should be there: centralized licensing.

Another issue is that at times there are certain jobs that are triggered one after another. It would be helpful to have a more user-friendly way of seeing how those jobs are connecting from one server to another. Suppose there is a workflow that is running between ten and 15 servers. It's always challenging to figure out which job is connected to which job on which server, for a newbie, if you haven't designed it. That has to be more user-friendly where you can see the complete workflow of a process or a job.

I haven't seen any issues regarding stability.

It's very scalable. It's easy. You just add on the resources and you are there. The management server doesn't get loaded up, it doesn't have to process anything. That makes it cheaper as well. Scalability is pretty easy.

On a scale of one to 10, with 10 being highest, I would rate technical support a nine. So far, I haven't gone unanswered for any of the queries, except one. Their response time is pretty fast. It depends on how severe the case is. If it's just a general query, they respond within a day. If it's really critical, where your business is impacted, they respond within half-an-hour or an hour. I have had a really good experience with the tech support.

I have been an admin on other tools as well. I was a contributor to and implemented BMC Control-M.

I haven't done the initial setup, but I think it's pretty straightforward from what I have seen in the documents. My feeling is it should not take more than an hour or two to get it up and running. If everything is ready, your database is there, and you have the right amount of resources on the server, it shouldn't take more than an hour or two hours.

In terms of an implementation strategy: 

1. You should have a database. 
2. You need to figure out what components you're going to go for.
3. You need an estimation of the number of jobs you are looking for to plan out the resources on the server. 
4. Finally, you need to think about how you will roll out access to the users: a thick client or a web console. 

Those are the things that need to be factored in before beginning the installation. The accessibility part can be dealt with later, but the resourcing of the database on the server and the management server have to be spec'd out before.

I understand that AWA is cheaper than Control-M, but I'm not certain about the numbers.

What makes it stand out from the competitors I have seen is it has distributed architecture. If you look at BMC Control-M vs Automic Workload Automation, the brain is the central, enterprise management server. That's where all the jobs reside. Every day, a new set of jobs loads onto the agent, and then the agent executes. If the central server is down, there will be no jobs executing across the environment.

However, when it comes to CA Automic, it has a distributed architecture which means all the logic, all the jobs, reside on the agent itself. Irrespective of whether the management server is running or not, your jobs will execute in a timely way. The only challenge could be that you will not be able to see their outcome. You will not be able to monitor them. That could be a challenge. But again, at least the jobs are executing in a timely fashion, as they're supposed to, in your environment.

It's the same for any end tool we implement: Be clear with the requirements. Apart from that, everything is pretty smooth and straightforward. You can look at the tool and understand where things are going. There is no rocket science that you need to be worried about. But you do need to be aware of what you're doing.

Regarding the number of staff for maintenance, it depends on how exactly you want to maintain it. We always keep all the UPROCS, all the jobs that we have in an environment, on a centralised server as a backup. The maintenance is up to the individual organization, how robust or how limited they want it to be on the day of a crisis.

In our organization, we have a team of nine people handling the tool. We have more than 12,000 tasks that are scheduled to run each day, and more than 100,000 job iterations happen every day. It's actually a really big environment. We have more than 1,400 nodes connected to it, and we are bringing in 300 more. At each of those additional nodes we are expecting four to five jobs. So that will add about 1,500 tasks. The number of iterations expected is still unknown.

Right now, we execute jobs in three regions: Europe, Asia-Pacific, and America. We are only using AWA in the European region. We are taking it into Asia as well. That's the next expansion of the tool.

The admin roles include handling new requests for creation of the tasks and sessions, as well as the changes to existing jobs, including notification, and daily scheduling. In addition, there is the daily maintenance part. We check for jobs that are failing every day, why they are failing, and we will try to mitigate the problem. It could be the agent needs to be purged, or the agent is not running, or the credentials that were given for a specific job are not there anymore. Those are the sorts of checks we do on a daily basis to keep it healthy.

I rate Automic Workload Automation at eight out of ten. What comes to mind when I consider that rating is the distributed licensing, that every server has to be licensed individually. The second is the workflow of jobs connected on multiple servers.