AutoSys Workload Automation Reviews

It's a pretty solid product. The stability of it is probably its best feature. Also, the newer versions are going to have extended job numbers.

It's our hub for all our job scheduling, so basically everything we do goes through there.

Upgrades to the GUI interface would be probably one of the biggest things they could do to improve. With the up and coming youth of today, they want to be on a GUI instead of on a mainframe, so a better GUI interface would probably be the best upgrades they've had. Plus the CLI could be improved.

We've had no issues with deployment since implementing it.

One of the biggest strengths is the stability of the product.

No, not really. We've had no issues with scaling it.

Technical support is very good. They're always on top of things.

My advice would be to compare CA to BMC. We did, and found CA to be the better product.

I think the speed of it, the consistency of it and that it stays up all the time. We've not had any problems with it in the last year. We upgraded to the last version and I'm here taking a look at the newest version that they've released, 1136. We're on 35. It's promised to be a better product, it's much faster and just as reliable. They also have a great web interface that we haven't deployed yet.

We've had bad systems from other organizations that we've adopted or bought. Workload Automation used to be called AutoSys, and it is actually a better scheduler in my opinion because of the way it schedules. With a base on dependency, events and job triggers. It works on events and triggers. Some of them automatically create jobs and they reschedule them.

AutoSys has it a little differently and it's quite easy to use. It's very easy to set up and it just launches a script anywhere that we have a local agent installed on a server. It goes throughout the world in different locations.

It also works based in Houston, at one of our data centers. We also have some people overseas and we use it abroad. It's a worldwide application that runs over 160,000 jobs throughout our enterprise.

I see room for improvement, as far as monitoring the system and having a quiet data center, when you don't have to have people monitoring and watching jobs run or watching flows going and looking for something to stop or a job to fail. I want to be alerted when we have a problem. I don't want to sit and watch a screen or have a staff of people sitting around the world waiting for something to fail. By having a so-called quiet or lights out system, where we get alerted just on these exceptions. That's the direction I'd like to see the product take. You spend a lot of quality time and money on people watching simple things happen. Lights go green, lights go red or lights go yellow. If we only saw something when they went red, those are the kind of alarms and notations I'd like to have to give to a staff of people that can handle those issues and get it restarted.

9 years.

The problem has not been with workload, we do have some server outages. Also maintenance times of other products. Workload Automation is dynamic enough to put jobs in pending or put servers offline, until we get ready to bring them on. As soon as they go back online, the server's jobs start rescheduling themselves again. It's a dynamic product, it's been stable and we've never had a real outage with the product.

We have it right now operating in something called dual server mode. If we lose one end of it or one processor, the other side takes over and it picks up from where it left off. It's an always up situation. If we have to throw it back to the primary then we take it down, do an amendments window, do a quick switch over to the primary and let it keep operating.

We never really miss a beat.

As I said, we have agents, our servers, in other locations in different cities and in different countries. We are able to contact with those, schedule batch runs on those and bring the results back to Houston as far as the successes or the failures of those processes.

Technical support from CA has been very good actually. We don't need them very often unless we have a problem with some integration such as a 64-bit application and something that's foreign we're putting on a server, such as BusinessObjects or Oracle, something we haven't seen before. We'll call them for some support. Otherwise our staff is pretty knowledgeable enough and we've had CA products for about 9 years. We're pretty familiar with it on site. It's just when some of the newer products come in, integrating with those, those are the times we've had to call CA support.

As far as the product itself, just learning about some of the new features, we'll speak with their support personnel to find out they operate or how they can implement it with our staff. Once they come on site and given us some information, how-to's, then we pick it up for ourselves. We don't need support as often as we used to with the prior products.

The initial setup, what we had, was called 35 then we went to a 45 version. Now we went from the 45 to what's called R11, that was a nightmare. R11 was a pretty difficult implementation for us. A lot of things changed between the two versions. After we got over those humps, CA put out another service pack and that relieved most of our problems. I think a lot of the rest of the industry suffered some of the same issues that we had.

They were able to quickly release those within 6 or 7 months.

I would give AutoSys a 10/10. Best practices are to plan your workflow. Try to plan where you have as less intervention as you can possibly use. Use the product and the triggers, the timing base events, use the calendars and try to make it flow as smooth as possible. Don't put something that's troublesome into your production environment. Work it out in tests and UAT or development. Even try it in your sandbox if necessary but don't bring it to production.

When it comes to production, if it doesn't work, send it back. You don't want these problems in production. At the shop I work with, we have a 99.91% success rate. When we don't have that, we go through and examine the jobs that fail. If they failed then we have a problem, we examine and get them fixed.

Important buying criteria: reputation, longevity, how is their product and other people's opinions of the product as well. After we've test driven a product, we usually bring something in-house, drive it and see how we like it. If we have use for it, we have enough people that would take a buy in on it, find it's useful, we find it's dependable then we probably want to set something like that in as a candidate. We need to have something that's proven.

Most of all it automates the processes we need to get done at night. We've grown into it. We have several thousand jobs in our production environment right now, about 40,000 altogether, and that number's going to be growing because with the success that we're seeing with certain applications that have submitted jobs to the workload automation, other groups in our company are saying "Hey, we want to get onboard too and automated our processes, too."

The benefits are that it's automated, reporting facilities are terrific, also when there is, let's say, a failure of a job, it's very, very easy to report that incident, that event, and we can certainly notify the appropriate personnel who need to be notified of that, very, very quickly.

I've wondered about certain features. Our release of iDash right now is 11.4. I have seen release 12 in the labs and presentation and I'm just blown away by the features that I see. Many of the things I was thinking about, asking about, they were already answered in the new release. CA has a roadmap and they have even more features coming in down the road which I like very much, so we're very, very happy with that, and that goes of course, for other products as well.

12 years.

No issues. Once we went from version 4.5 to 11.0 and now 11.36, we have experienced great stability as time goes on.

No problems with scalability at all. Our centralized AutoSys server are running processes, jobs on several hundred client machines without a problem, without a problem at all. We foresee a growth in that as time goes on over the next year or so.

We have great faith in the CA tech support website, and their responses to us every time we have a question, even if it's just a question on functionality, never mind it might be a problem that may come up, they respond to us very quickly; so we feel very, very secure with that. That actually is also true for many other CA products that we have at our sites as well.

If we did have a serious problem, which happens very, very rarely - we contact them by email; they've resolved every single issue that we've had.

We had AutoSys 3.4 which used to belong to Platinum Technologies, they became part of CA. I'm thinking right now compared to what it was like then back in 2004, the number of jobs was very, very small, but we knew that as we went forward with CA with the new releases that it would grow very easily with that and meet the demand, which it has done, and we don't see any problem, any limit to the software at this point.

No, not complex at all, very, very easy. One of the products I'm working on which is CA iDash, a monitor for the automation tools, is extremely easy to use, extremely easy to install, to setup, to configure and run. In fact, that was one of our reasons for going with it this past year, that particular product of the whole CA Workload Automation package.

When it comes to advice I would say that obviously cost is one factor, I never get involved with that, but cost is a factor. That's a very good question because we recently purchased iDash this year, and it's intended to replace a third party competitor software which we're using right now, and even though iDash was about 15% more, because of licensing and ease of use, that 15% more is more than paid for by the flexibility we have, because the other software we're limited to how many instances we can have of it, and how many jobs it can see - iDash, no limit at all. As many iDash instances as we want, and there's no limited to how many AutoSys environments we're going to be monitoring, and that's a real plus for not only the users but also IT management and upper management as well.

Rating: at least 9.5, 9.6/10 for sure. I probably shouldn't say 10 because I want to give CA something to work at and work towards, so 9.9.

I heartily recommended them, even if they had software such as the Terma Labs JAWS or something else, to really very seriously consider looking at iDash for the lot of features, it's so easy to use, I said "CA will be very glad to a proof of concept test trial install for you, and then you can do a comparison." I didn't try to push people, say "Oh, iDash is a lot better." I said "I think they should decide for themselves." But I think it'll be evident once they get it in, look at it, and do a comparison. There's a good guarantee they'll go in that direction, I would think, based upon my own experiences.

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.