AutoSys Workload Automation Reviews

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.

It is being used for all the ETL processing and batch processing that we have in the enterprise. It is being used for automated file processing. We get the file from the mainframe.

It gives a real-time view of all the batch processing that we have. Monitoring-wise, it is really good. 

It also gives us the ability to connect different software processes.

I am not sure whether it is our limitation or a tool limitation because we haven't yet explored it, but whenever we look for different types of reporting, we have some limitations in getting those. It could be because of the way we have set it up internally in our enterprise, but it would be helpful if we can customize the reporting features and some of the alerts that can go out. When we connect enterprise systems, each one looks for a different use case, and if we can get different types of reporting, it will be helpful.

My team has been working with AutoSys for the last 10 to 15 years.

It is stable. 

It is used pretty much across all enterprise areas. We have six or seven business units with more than 10,000 people who are using this solution. Application-wise, close to 500 applications are using this solution.

We don't directly interact with their tech support. We have our own team for tech support. We are at the end-user level, and we request our team to set up our processes. 

It is straightforward once we know the process. For its maintenance, we have our own team that manages the solution. We are the end-users, so we don't get involved in its maintenance. They just tell us about the downtime on some weekends, and they take care of upgrading the solution.

We have been using it for a long time, but now we are looking at some of the cloud solutions. We are moving a lot of processes to the cloud, and the features for the cloud are being investigated.

I would rate it a nine out of 10.

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.

We use it to run different jobs across different servers.

The initial setup is easy.

It's a stable product.

The solution can scale. 

There should be easier migrations from a different bus scheduler. Prior to this workload, we were using BMC control M and the migration was really hard. We had to manually create the jobs and there was no sort of automation for the migration. Workload Automation could improve the handling of file transfer jobs. Compared to control M, control M allows multiple file transfers. It can have five types of files that can be transferred. They have different file formats or different sizes. You can configure it in control M. Here, you only have one and three for file transfer. A lot of times you also encounter issues with SSL crypto in conflict on certain jobs. Basically, the newer servers have newer security measures and currently, the product is not compatible with them.

I've used the solution for seven years. 

The solution is stable. there are no bugs or glitches. It does not crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

We had a few issues, however, the issues were more on the infrastructure rather than with the application itself.

We have 60 people using the solution.

It's scalable. It can expand as needed. 

We've used technical support. We find them very helpful and responsive and are satisfied with the level of service we get.

Positive

I find it simple to set up. However, the fear really is understanding how Workload Automation handles jobs as compared to control M. They have similarities, however, they handle schedules and jobs differently.

At the moment, we have a team of two or three handling the support for the product.

We handled the implementation ourselves, although we did request an overview of the installation and setup process. 

If you looked at the client price, I'd rate the cost five out of five.I heard from recent talks with support that they removed the licensing scheme that we had before. Maybe the rating would be lower now. Before they had this unlimited installation of agents across and service. They've since removed that scheme.

We did not evaluate other solutions. It was the client's position to use this product as they were offered a good deal. At that time, we were using control M and I was initially hesitant due to the challenges I saw in terms of how the product handles the jobs. The client already decided on the solution and we just had to learn to love it. 

We're using the solution at the request of a client. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

The most valuable feature is the ease of coding up schedules to run jobs in both the mainframe and distributed environments.

Prior to installing ESP, we had to use two products: one for mainframe and one for distributed.

It allowed us to consolidate our monitoring down to one particular console in one particular environment.

We need the ability to be able to have Windows user passwords changed periodically and automatically.

I have used it for 6 and 1/2 years.

When we first installed ESP, we had a few issues with the ability of jobs to have their status reported across sysplexes.

We have not encountered any issues with scalability.

Technical support is 7 out of 10, with 10 being exceptional.

We previously had Maestro for scheduling the distributed environment and CA7 for scheduling the mainframe environment.

The setup was not too terribly complex, but it did take some time to learn all the complexities of the product.

Well, the product is part of our ELA with CA, but we do have a specific number of licenses we can use for the distributed agents we deploy, so you have to be careful as to what limit you set for number of agents, so you have room to grow in your environment.

Before choosing this product, we also evaluated BMC Control-M.

Take the time to learn how to use the GUI and learn how to code the schedules. There are a lot of different ways to code schedules.

The flexibility of being able to schedule the timing and frequency of different automation scripts makes it easier for us to meet our customers’ business requirements.

We use the WCC, which is an interface that sits on top of the application. That is pretty user friendly in terms of being able to see the status of job flows, job failures; and in the ability to manually intervene and fix issues. Essentially, the code you're running sends a return code, which you can configure to be read as a success or failure.

We're in healthcare. We need a way to automate loading the members and processing claims. Without a tool, we wouldn't be able to do that efficiently. It increased efficiency.

The most important thing is that duration is not displayed in the actual WCC GUI. I know they have some different add-on tools where you can get that information; but it would be nice to be able to see how long jobs ran, and the history for more than ten days. As is, the scheduler already starts to have performance issues when you keep the ten day history. So there are efficiency issues related to being able to keep more logs.

There are always issues with software. They have some improvements they can make. The way they're heading, I think they're on the right track.

Stability has been good since we took release 11.36. Before that, we had release 11.35. That was somewhat stable. We had growing pains because we switched over from a different scheduling tool.

It has been easily scalable. CA helped us build the Workload Automation infrastructure that we knew we were going to grow into. It was really a partnership between the two of us to make sure we were scaled correctly. We do about 10,000 jobs a week, a couple hundred thousand a month.

Early in my career, I was more on the technical side. Now that I've transitioned to management, I step in at times to help with it, but not as much.

The few times that I get involved, it's usually bad because it's an escalated incident of some sort. I think primarily my team's happy with the support they get from the resources that have been engaged; and works with them through the issues.

We were using Tidal Enterprise Scheduler. We switched over, and then had some growing pains during the transition.

My team owns setting it up, configuring it, supporting it, and all of those things.
The first time we set it up, it was a little overwhelming because it's something different and new. I had a newer resource on it, and there was a time constraint for getting it installed. We had somebody from CA handhold us through the process.

A couple of our customers use Control M, so we considered that as well, from what I understand.

Do your homework, and be ready for a challenge. Anytime you switch tools, it's going to be a challenge.

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.

Enterprise job scheduling.

We have worked with CA to better understand all of the security points, the ability to lock the product down so that it's not being abused or exploited in any fashion.

• Flexibility
• Ease of use
• The capabilities of the product to schedule on multiple platforms, multiple operating systems.

Also, over time the CA workload agent has gotten much better. For our organization it's important for us to communicate in a secure fashion between the host and the other platforms, and we are able to do that with our CA product, with ESP.

I would rate it a nine out of 10.

Scalability is a 10 out of 10.

We've completely turned over our scheduling area, and a lot of questions go to CA support. The people in the CA support for ESP have been there for a long time. I know some of them from the time when they worked for Cybermation, and they are very good. I trust their answers.

Tech support is a 10 out of 10.

Back in 2006, we were using CA-7 and we were looking for a product that would do better for scheduling off-platform. We found ESP, which was at that time owned by Cybermation, and we completed migration from CA-7 to ESP, and then shortly after that CA bought ESP. It had to do with scheduling on the distributed platform.

CA-7 was expensive and didn't do distributive work load very well. It was not that flexible. It didn't do everything we needed it to do.

We had Professional Services help us, and it wasn't really that difficult.

We did have onsite training and migration services and we paid for them. It wasn't hard to understand for our people.

I don't really get involved in that part of it. The one thing I would say is that people need to pay attention to how they use their ESP agents on the distributed platform. That's where some of the cost comes in, based on how many you need or how many you use.

At that time CA owned three schedulers and CA-7 was the one we were using. The other two did not necessarily apply to our environment. And there weren't too many others out there. I think we might still have taken a cheap route. We might not of actively compared with other products that were on the market at the time, other than comparing it to CA, and we thought we were getting a good deal.

I believe CA had been actively developing it, enhancing it, and attempting to make it easier to use. I think it's been a good product for us, and I think others would find that to be true as well.