AutoSys Workload Automation Reviews

You see a lot of automation tools right now in the market. Whenever we try to look at the products that clients are trying to use, we try to see which one is better matched for their requirements. Most of the times, we try to gauge their level of understanding of the products as well. Workload Automation gives a lot of insight for the client, to better understand how they can actually automate the process of scheduling the jobs within their environment. Workload Automation really plays a good role. If you see every product come with its own workload or its own scheduling product so if you talk about SAP, SAP rebuilt its own scheduling product. You talk about Hulu which comes with Uzi which is its own scheduling product. Having a different scheduling product scattered around in the environment, it is really a tough for the management to have a better in-scope of seeing what actually is happening in the scheduling area.

Centralizing all this into a single workload automation tool using the CA product has really helped a lot of customers. This has benefited most of the users to have a better understanding of the environment. It's pretty good compared to the older versions. It actually supports a lot of new features where you can also implement in our clustered solutions and also in higher availability with more of load balancing and everything.

One of my clients who has recently converted everything from the Architecture to what they are using to the complete iPad and solutions. Deploying those solutions and integrating with them was a little challenge at this point of time. We would definitely like to see some kind of roadmap with this workload automation product, having integrations with mobility as well.

It's pretty stable compared to the older versions I would say.

The scalability - it is really good. I mean there are other products which do play the similar roles but having this workload automation in place and having a different product integrating with it whenever there is a need, you have a Windows shop today and tomorrow now most of the clients are trying to migrate from Windows to Unix. When we have that shift change happening, adding more clients and having more support for this operating systems to schedule this systems, this is really playing a lot of help in the scalability of managing this product.

I would rate them a 9 on a scale of 10. They are really good. We had a lot of help at the time of migrations that we usually plan with our clients when we do implement a solution or when we try to do the upgrades. The CA partners usually help us in even mentioning that as a hard site, because of this hard site there will be a dedicated technician who will be helping us. In order that if there is anything working during the migration period or anything like that. We don't really run around with the different people in order to get our solution done. One engineer who is dedicated to our site during that hard site period will be helping and resolving most of the issues. Support is really good with CA. Set-up is depending on the client's environment, how big and how small they are. We just need to understand that better requirements and providing that solution in order to set up this product in their environment. Makes a lot of work that we need to do in order to better understand their requirements

Setup: we can say it's not that complex compared to other products. CA has a very user friendly environment where we can actually do it in no time. Moving towards the mobility because most of the clients are converting themselves from old school sitting in front of their desktops. Everyone wants to manage through mobile products.

Rating: I would say 9/10 because I believe always there is a scope of implement for every product. There is nothing like everything is really best in product so yeah there is still scope of improvement with workload automation tool.

So far what we are doing, we are really happy with this product. When they talk about the workload automation solutions, we definitely try to explain how better it can be having worked with the CA producs compared to others. It's pretty easy because most of the corportation do understand the requirement and what best that solves. The best part of the CA is it is open to integrate with multiple products. It is not that we cannot integrate or we do not have anything like that. The support has more scope where they can also work with us in order to do a third party integration as required as well. I mean it's pretty easy for us.

CA7 is very robust and one of CA's legacy products. The batch platform varies depending on who installed it. The iDash feature sits on the top of it, but we're not using that. 

CA7 also extracts and externalizes data without having to be reengineered, which keeps the mainframe people happy.

It's hard to share any information out of it for data analytics or anything like that because its siloed.

Also, we tried the INS data collection feature as well as the DB2 feature (except for data presentation). We're not very happy with those.

I don't recall how long we've used it, but it's been a while.

It deployed without any issue.

We've not had any stability issues.

It scales fine for us.

We tried BMC, CA, and IBM. We tried IBM OMEGAMON for a very long time, 20+ years. CA offers SYSVIEW.

MainView is a BMC product for monitoring. OMEGAMON is monitoring from IBM. Each one of them cover a different set of products.

It provides us with reliable scheduling of various business workloads. There are various service-level agreements, such as payroll, that need to be met at a certain period of time and if they're not met, there's going to be trouble. The reporting facility of the product helps me to identify problematic jobs in the environment.

The reliability issues need to be resolved. We have some patches that need to be applied and that's our next step to trying to get this thing resolved. In particular, one of the issues is licensing, so that could become a real problem for you if you're in a very large environment. It could get very costly if you want to scale this product out. It will scale, technically, but licensing may prevent that from happening.

I'd also like better reporting and a better UI.

It has issues and is not entirely stable. For example, the graphical interface is not 24/7 for us.

Just 8-10 people are using it as we're not a big shop.

I have some of the other team members handle technical issues as it takes a lot of time to diagnose stuff. If I can't get past an issue, I turn it over to one of the other guys and let them work on it. But, no, I have not dealt with CA in their support infrastructure.

I was not involved in the setup. I'm relatively new with the company, but have a lot of experience with scheduling.

For the most part it compares similarly to IBM and they each have their pluses and minuses. They both scale out and they're both found in very large environments.

One piece of advice I can give is training. You need to have some sort of a background in this in order to use this product effectively. If you're not trained up, you're not going to be successful with it.

I have a lot of jobs that run using CA 7. So I work with my production analysts to set up processes that helps me do things that I don't have to do manually.

One of the things I do is that I am in charge of replication. We replicate from Livingston, New Jersey through Fort Worth, Texas, and replication from time to time will drop because people do things that cause links go down. So when they fail, there is a manual way to recover them, but I have to type out all these commands. Because I know what I need to do I put stuff in jobs and using CA Process Automation and CA 7 together to bring over my replication without ever doing anything manually.

I've used this product for a long time, but the GUI to me feels outdated. I know how to use it well, but it feels old.

We've used it for over 20 years.

Deployment is not an issue.

CA 7 is stable all the time.

It's very scalable. There's no problem there.

I haven't had to use technical support.

I wasn't involved in the setup.

I'm sure 90% of the world uses CA 7, so it's a known product.

The most valuable feature for us is security. We now have extra job types, so instead of three, we have 55. We use the database plugin and, instead of running a job through OCO, we can run it through WCC. The SQL is right there on the spot.

We're able to find jobs and seeing how everything looks. We just upgraded from 4.5 to 11.3. It is a lot more powerful and a lot more secure. The security features are top notch. Anyone within the company could get in and do whatever they wanted if they had access to 4.5, but with 11.3 we can put them in an AD group and then assign security based on the AD group, so it's great.

We found some things in our system where there were unnecessary delays, so we were able to take those out. It saved our batch and saved us some time running our batch at night.

The job flow could use a little more improvement. When we had 4.5, one of the things we were able to where a job was and where the flow was as your batch was running. With 11.3, it's a little more difficult. The jobs are not necessarily in the order that they're running and it's difficult to follow that way.

Also, they could improve the GUI. I would like to see just a better job flow where they could instead of showing jobs in the queue order, showing them in the order that they actually run in so you can follow it top to bottom. This seems to me to be more logical.

We've had no issues with deployment since the complex upgrade.

It's been stable.

It meets our scalability needs.

We have a part-time consultant who used to work for CA and he knows a lot of people, so he's actually pretty good at getting technical support whenever it needs it.

It was pretty complex going from 4.5 to 11.3.6. Just the migrating and all the security settings and all the changes in the job types and having to set up the pages on different servers made the upgrade complex.

Although there were some doubts during our upgrade, I think this turned out to be the best product, as long as you're prepared and have your servers ready to go.

I find the UI to be a really nice feature. It's great and pretty user friendly. Also, there are many agent integrations available that support various platforms.

It provides us with automated management of a high volume of workloads across our enterprise.

I'd like to see more agents for integrations with other platforms. Also, I think the interface could be unified in a better way. Additionally, we could benefit for more data analytics.

We've had no issues with deploying it.

It is very stable and we haven't had any problems.

They are enhancing the product for new limits, so we should be able to scale without a problem.

They have great support when we work together.

The initial setup was very straightforward. It's a great benefit that you can install and configure it very quickly.

I would recommend the product, but you have to have a good team to work with it. The solution is good, but you need a prepared team.

Our challenge is having a centralized schedule on a single pain with 180,000 jobs each day. We are looking to move to iDASH with predictive analytics. We don’t have many SLA’s. We're looking to do better with predictive analytics and we want to further integrate.

We were using a lot of homegrown stuff. This solution provides us with more details on jobs failing. It also gives us restorability. For the last 10 years, it's become more complex, but it's also bridged our platforms and gave us the ability to recover.

I'd like to see automation pushed even further, giving us greater looks into other systems. I'd like more enhanced process automation and have it manage a few more platforms without relying on another orchestration platform.

We've used it for 10 years.

We've had no issues with deploying it.

It's stable. It’s so busy finding maintenance windows, and we are currently going through exercises.

We can leverage multiple servers with ease.

Technical support is knowledgeable and I don’t have a whole lot of complaints. We don’t get the run around.

We had already had some other CA technologies, so it was a good fit and we knew what we were dealing with.

Initial setup and upgrades were straightforward.

Understand your needs, don’t complicate it, and understand what you are looking for. You don’t want to create an automated mess.

In our current environment, we have a large community of users. So Workload Automation helps us with our complex job scheduling with automating placements.

I believe it's a mission-critical application that is required within the company because everything requires to be scheduled. Everything needs to move. In today's economy, everything is 365-24/7.

In all aspects of the company, whether you're in the actual trading or in the wholesale or retail space, you're our internal client and we treat you like a customer. Ultimately, we're in operations.

It needs more complex scheduling capabilities on the end points. For that to happen, you really need the next version of AutoSys that has the ability to do that. We used it as an opportunity to test out what that next version going to look like, so when we deployed enterprise-wide, we had a little bit of understanding of how it's going to work.

Also, it shouldn't take longer than six months to do a deployment. I heard good things about being portable, meaning CA is able to introduce a lot of agents as packages on top of your existing environment that you're going to add. That's some of the good things that I'm hearing and I'm looking forward to seeing those because our business requirements always expand.

I'd also like to see iDASH integration with monitoring, which I think is up and coming.

I've used it for almost 3 years.

I've had no issues deploying it.

We've had stability issues, but CA's pretty prompt about fixing things for us. We've had commonly-known bugs that are fixed after an upgrade.

It's been scalable. Architecture-wise, it's pretty robust, and we've been able to work it out with CA. We run over 10,000 jobs a day.

Technical support is relatively on the upper hand of some of the companies that we deal with because we do have dealings with our account management team. When we have a major deployment, the support team is made fully aware of that. If, for example, if we're doing a deployment on the weekend, we have a 1-800 number that we can call. It's been great.

For the original implementation, I wasn't involved, but we are moving to a newer release. We have built an environment where I was involved. Complexity-wise, it's more or less a specific business requirement that we needed.

At this moment, we've been pretty long-term customer with CA. I don't think there's any product out there that we're going to be willing to switch out at the moment, given what their customer base is, what the capabilities of the product and how it fits into our model.