AutoSys Workload Automation Reviews

For workload automation, I think the most valuable feature is the robustness, being able to support high availability for as many batch jobs that we process on a daily basis.

It is a key one for our company. We run it as an enterprise solution; everything from payrolls, to manufacturing, to everything in the back end, is critical. We definitely can count on it being up all the time.

A couple of key features would be really being able to support a scheduler that, instead of a centralized scheduler, maybe a distributed one, so where a scheduler doesn't come down; not everything stops all at one time and so on.

Stability is actually why we selected this solution, for being able to support high availability. Otherwise, we wouldn't go to a single instance of it across the company.

Scalability is actually what supports our decision to go with it. Being able to go from supporting one organization to all our organizations across the company, has been great.

Technical support has been outstanding. They've been able to really answer a lot of the questions that we've gone to for them. Turnaround has been great. Typically, if we put in a ticket, we get a response within hours, at least within 24 hours.

I wasn't engaged in the setup, but I know there were some complexities when we first started, because we were dealing with multiple instances and trying to get it to one and so on.

Definitely look at this product. There are a lot of key features in there that will definitely help organizations out.

It really supports, and CA's been great in showing the robustness of the tool and addressing any issues with anything that you come across with it.

I think there're still some more improvements in there, some things that we're finding out as we're using it, the tool. It's definitely on the higher end.

CA Workload Automation automates across multiple platforms. We're actually getting rid of our mainframe; so it's allowed us to use a distributive scheduling package. Getting rid of our mainframe is a big deal to my company.

It enables you to tie into audit systems, gives you a lot of visibility as far as workload goes, and allows you to automate it as well.

On the mainframe version of ESP, there was a scheduling parameter called NOTWITH. If you placed this parameter on two jobs you didn’t want running at the same time, ESP would recognize that one was running and the other wouldn’t run, even if its scheduling requirements had been met. This allowed our company to combat contention issues without creating extra or false predecessor/successor relationships. The D-series, ESP-DE, doesn’t have this parameter. Once we realized how much we were leveraging this feature on the mainframe version, and that we wouldn’t have it on ESP-DE, we were a little disappointed. I’m not sure how much of an undertaking it would be to have it added to ESP-DE, but it would be very beneficial to us, as well as other DE clients that I spoke with at Ca World. Hopefully this could be added to the next release of DE and we could get it in before we go totally live in production with DE early this summer.

The secure SimLib/password feature from Autosys I was referencing gave us the ability to hide/secure environment variables by storing them on a totally different server in which security could be controlled. Once the job ran that used the environment variable, or database password, a developer or operator couldn’t see the environment variable/database password resolved in the spool file. Basically what we’re looking for is the ability to store database passwords or environment variables, on or in ESP, without them being seen by a developer or operator. We don’t want anyone to see the resolved environment variables in the spool file or to have to store them on the server. Currently we’re having to store these environment variables on the server, which isn’t a permanent solution according to our Security Admins.

It seems stable, as far as I know. It's been around for awhile, so it's a good product. From our testing, it's been fine. We have a failover situation as well that we've tested; so it's worked fine for us.

We don't have any problems with scalability either. That seems to be fine for us.

Initial setup was fairly straightforward. Well, the biggest thing was that we were already using Workload Automation ESP for mainframe; so we just took that and moved it to the distributed engine, or to the DE series. There are a lot of similarities between the two.

We compared CA Workload Automation with IBM, as well as BMC. We went with CA because we really like the interface, and the way it worked with our products that we already had in house. We did have a bunch of other CA products, and it seemed to tie in pretty well with those.

It just depends on what they're coming from. If they're coming from the mainframe flavor, just know that they are similar, but there are still some very glaring differences that you have to accommodate to.

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.

SME for Cross Platform Agent installation and configuration. We have taken over ownership from the Unix Ops Team for installing, configuring, and administering the Systems Agents. I have also installed and stood up the Web Client. Currently, rolling it out to the general population of our company.

Scheduling workload across multiple platforms from a single point of contact and integration with ERP/ETL type platforms and products, such as Oracle and SEQUEL.

• Flexible agent configurations
• Integration with multiple services and applications across the enterprise.

Sunset CA-7 and stop leading people on with it. 

ESP, Dseries, and now Automic are CA's strategic vision. Not much engineering being done with CA-7 any longer. As a "batch scheduler", it is and always has been a workhorse. As we all know, batch scheduling is antiquated. Workload Automation is the future and changing the product name to CA Workload Automation, CA-7 Edition does not make it a modern WLA Platform.

What I like about it is that we use it as our enterprise-level scheduling systems. We used to have scattered jobs scheduled. They all had problems every day. The troubleshooting made a huge mess for the whole company. After we started using CA Workload Automation, everything became one integrated system. It makes the troubleshooting and monitoring much easier.

We started with Workload Automation 10 years ago. Before we started, we had about three hundred scheduler jobs distributed in different Unix systems, Window systems, AIX systems. Everyday you need to fix some problem. Once we built the Workload Automation, everything was in one centralized place.

As a management firm, every morning we have to be ready to trade, as soon as the stock market opens. To be able to trade, the nightly cycle jobs are very critical. If any one of them isn’t ready, you cannot trade at 9:30. It's always a struggle for us. For a while, we had about five people just for overnight support. After we integrated Workload Automation into our system, we are down to two people.

Like almost everyone else, we like to make it more web-available. Right now, it's a thick client so you need to have a desktop client do all the work and the monitoring. People like to just go to a browser, look for the jobs and monitor them. That is something we’d like to see. I think we're very happy with this system.

We had some problems at first. I guess every new system has some problems. That was ten years ago. We had a very good consultant from CA. He basically became a resident expert for us for three months. He basically enhanced the whole workload, and improved all those workflows for us. After that, it has been running very smoothly for us.

Our total number of jobs grew about five-fold. We used to have about 100,000 jobs a month. Now we have about a half million jobs a month.

We had one time when we did an upgrade, which did not go smoothly. I remember clearly that we had about 53 open tickets with CA in one week, but CA support is very, very good. They eventually sent us someone who was just wonderful. They sent him to our office and he sat down with us on-site, and he helped us with the whole thing. CA support is wonderful.

The technical support is absolutely the most important to us. When you manage support systems, you want to have someone who can back you up. Luckily CA support is very very good.

I think the initial setup is very straightforward itself. The migration is not. It's not because of the system. It's more because of the job itself. Our firm is about 90 years old. Over the years, it has accumulated a lot of legacy systems, and a lot of legacy jobs. You need to spend time to understand the job when you migrate to a new system.

We had so many NT schedulers, like cron jobs for Unix. We know this is not right. At that time, we luckily had a new CEO. When he came on board, he said the first thing we need to do is to have some enterprise scheduling. I was actually the one who was in charge of finding the right solution.

We went to IBM Tivoli, BMC Control-M; and then we also came to CA. What CA did is: instead of just selling some products to us, they actually sat down with us to understand our environment first. Then they come back to us, and say "Okay, I don't think you guys want to have AutoSys. "At that time, AutoSys was famous. Our environment is not big enough. So they said, "We think the Workload Automation dSeries is actually much better for you." I was very touched by a vendor who came to us and gave us the right solution, instead of just selling us something more expensive. That's the whole reason we chose the dSeries.

If you are considering this product, I would say just go for it. The planning is like I said: the systems stuff itself is easy, but the migration is not. You need to understand what you have now before you move on to different one.

CA Workload Automation AE (AutoSys Edition) should have a few features like the CA7 FQJOB command (to get all the downstream/upstream jobs with the batch current position).

I have used this solution for seven years.

We have not encountered any stability issues with the supported versions.

We have not encountered any scalability issues with the supported versions.

Technical support is 9/10; good and timely support.

It is a bit costly. (Again, it all depends on the enterprise and the requirements.)

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

I would suggest implementing CA Workload Automation AE.

Some of the features I like are:

• Ability to monitor a complex workload
• Easily see our batch flow status
• Deal with problems before they become bigger issues

As an example, we had a stuck file watcher we weren't aware of. Due to the alerts, we were able to reach out and get the file in time to still make our batch commitments. This happened instead of missing an SLA.

I think having visibility has improved things. Our managers can see what's going on as well. It's not just a single technician that's a bottleneck trying to find out where we are. Visibility into the workflow and ease of use to be able to schedule have improved our organization. I'm happy with this solution.

The main push is the web UI. We want to be able to give it to our business users. They don't want to have to log on to a mainframe to use the product. I would like to use iDash. If we can get iDash into ESP, it would be great, even though it first has to go to the DEs before it comes to us. That would be a big improvement. This is an option that we'd like to see.

No problems with scalability. That's actually one of the competitive advantages with this product - the scalability and its ability to do the throughput we need without having any delays. We have scaled as far as we can grow. I've been talking to other companies that are much larger. I'm confident it could scale if we had a tenfold growth and we'd still be okay.

I have not used technical support. Other people in my area have. They seem easy to work with. You know, get the documentation to them; they get back to you in a couple days with what they found.

We were using CA Scheduler Job Management and I think they ended support. I wasn't high enough up to be involved in the decision making process. By the time this solution rolled out, I was happy with how I was able to get up to speed in the product, and support what I needed to support. But I was not involved in evaluating other products.

When looking for a vendor, I suggest looking for long-term relationships, a partnership. You want a vendor who is willing to grow, willing to listen to feedback, offers support, and help us do our job. Make sure you partner with them. Get buy-in from your business units before implementing. I think that's one of the biggest things to success, is let CA get the buy-in for you if you don't feel comfortable doing it yourself. Let CA explain their own product. Get the buy-in first, then move forward so you don't have the resentment of the business units thinking you forced the solution upon them.

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.