AutoSys Workload Automation Reviews

We're able to monitor a complex workload, easily see where we're at in our batch flows, and take care of problems before they become bigger issues.

We had a stuck file-watcher we weren't aware of, and then because of alerting, instead of missing an SLA, we were able to reach out and get the file in time to still make our batch commitments.

I think just having visibility into it; our managers can see what's going on too. It's not just a single technician that's a bottleneck trying to find out where we are. 

So the visibility into the workflow, and ease of use to be able to schedule.

The main push is the web UI, to be able to give it to our business users. They don't want to have to log in to a mainframe to use the product.

If we can get iDASH into ESP that would help. I know this request is the fourth... We're "in the hole," we're not even on deck. So it's going to come out to DEs, then it will come to us. That would be a big improvement, an option that we'd like to see.

No issues at all. In fact, that's actually one of the, I would say, competitive advantages of this product, the scalability and its ability to do the throughput we would need without having any delays.

We've scaled with it 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, we'd still be okay.

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

Yes, CA Scheduler, at that time. I think they were dropping support for CA Scheduler.

At that time I wasn't high enough up. By the time it 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 choosing to work with a vendor, the most important criteria I look for are

• a long-term relationship
• a partnership
• willing to grow
• willing to listen to feedback
• support
• that they'll help us do our job.

I've worked with CA Workload Automation so I'm happy. I would say they're a nine out of 10 because I don't know anyone else. It's all relative. They could be a 10. I'm happy with them. I don't have any complaints. They're responsive.

Make sure you partner with them. Get buy-in from your business units before implementing. I think that's one of the biggest keys to success. If you don't feel comfortable let them explain their product. Get the buy-in first, then move forward so you don't have the resentment of, "Hey, you're forcing this product on us."

It's been great.

I find that it provides better agility in regards to job execution features.

The CA Autosys has assisted our organization by providing effective backend automation for enterprise application functionality.

This product needs to improve its graphical user interface.

I have used this product for about 12 years.

Lot of automation required and need to be aligned with DevOps.

I have not encountered any issues with stability.

I have not encountered any issues with scalability.

7/10

CA Technologies provides good technical support and I would give it a 7 out of 10 rating.

I found the installation process easy to follow.

Implement through vendor as special skills.

This product offers more jobs and stability.

After conducting extensive market evaluation, we chose the CA Autosys tool.

I would recommend to make use of outsourced software solutions such as Atgen for ensuring a stable setup process.

We find scheduling to be the most valuable feature because we can do so on multiple platforms and we can define them once then re-use them.

It's given our organization stability because we're able to perform scheduling functions that provides order and predictability to our workload.

I can't think of anything at the moment.

We've had no issues with deployment.

Never had any issues, which is the main reason we use it. We don’t use other products for scheduling on the mainframe.

We’ve never had any issues. We run over 300,000 jobs a day and we have thousands of end users, at least 10,000 who can evaluate their flows and manage schedules.

We've never needed tech support.

I've always been using it, so there was no previous solution.

The initial setup was done around 30 years ago, so I don't know whether it was simple or complex.

When we look for new products, the user functionality and ease of use are important, as is making sure it's stable. The knowledge transfer is easy.

We still use the green screen on the mainframe terminal screen instead of having a Windows-based view – though it's our decision. Overall, it's a good tool for an entire mainframe environment.

CA Workload Automation AutoSys Edition is one of the most powerful schedulers that you have on the open systems, or going between Window servers; to be able to schedule and take advantage of the different powers that the automation has with it.

I've taken advantage of not only the normal command jobs and stuff like that, but I've turned them into using the proper plugins, the job types. One of the things that I have found out is that I'm the one that's using most of the job types, because I've taken away the need for writing or scripting processes. When somebody knows the database and knows how to write SQL code, or they know how to write a stored procedure, they don't need to know how to write scripting in order to run their scripts.

It's a little bit of a cost savings thing by using a plugin and using the different job types that AutoSys has. It goes the same thing when you're running a web service and you want to update stuff.

Taking care of the customers is the number one thing for any client; the client that I'm with, it's the same thing. They want to make sure that the customers are happy.

The benefit of using this product is the fact that your return on investment is major. When you don't have to teach people how to script or how to write different codes because of the way they connect to stuff, you're saving money, because you're able to put stuff into a production environment in a much faster solution.

We're also able to update our customers and let them know via apps to be able to see from using a web service to run and they log in to see what their activity is or what the status is on their stuff. It's updated immediately.

Cost benefits are amazing because somebody doesn't have to call a customer service person and sit on the phone for 30 minutes to find out the same thing they can find out in two seconds on the internet.

To make it a lot more user-friendly, in order to make it so other people can use it without having to do much training with it; the more user-friendly it is, the easier it is to work with.

The product has been out since 2.0 which is when I started working with this Workload Automation and, have seen it grow to a more powerful system that has been able to resolve all types of different automation appliances.

Customer Service is as always a high quality and, have had great success with getting any issues resolved.

Great working with the Tech team.

I think it's one of the most powerful workload automation processes that are out there. It is able to reach across platforms. It's able to reach across appliances. It's able to update.

It's a matter of your return on investment. It goes right back to that. How much do you want to spend, but how much are you going to save?

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.

• Automation of patch process
• SQL integration
• Reporting

It has improved our organization by automating processes in a centralized platform. We are more productive and we can provide a better value to the business.

SQL server clustering is not supported.

We have been using the product for seven years.

Maintenance to the database must be performed to prevent stability issues.

We did not encounter any issues with scalability.

The technical support is good.

We previously used SQL but that solution is very limited.

The setup was straightforward.

Validate how many agents you need beforehand.

We evaluated JAMS.

I recommend that they evaluate a high availability infrastructure.

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.

What we really like is that it's an enterprise solution and it really allows us to do the "normal work," the different operating systems and platforms, but it also allows us to manage and control our ERP systems, and things like Informatica and Hadoop, and all those good things that are coming down the line, in the way of big data and things like that.

The really nice thing is that, as the business grows, we're not seeing the infrastructure grow. Regardless of how much new business we keep on, the team is pretty stable. We have a dedicated team of eight people. We maintain today nine instances of DE: three production and six pre-production. We're probably going to add a couple more in 2017, but we don't anticipate having to grow the infrastructure. We'll be able to keep serving the customers the same way we have historically and we'll be able to do that into the future, without seeing any degradation in service.

We would like to see good improvement on the historical reporting capabilities. It's always been, I think, a bit of a weak point. Currently, if you know a SQL programmer, he should become your best friend, but I'd like to see it get to the point where somebody with really basic skills – where they understand the information they want – can easily extract it. That's really the big area with room for improvement.

The development team has been really good about keeping up with not only our requests but the user community as a whole. We're pretty happy about it, but that's the one exception.

It's extremely stable. We put in the Canadian systems about three years ago, and we have not had an incident in the three years that has kept us down for more than a couple of hours.

Support has been really good. If we need to call somebody, generally they're on the line in a few minutes, and we get right into the diagnostics and we're set to go again. Extremely stable; the agents are perfect. They never give us a problem at all. The servers are getting awfully close.

It's our impression that we're probably one of the larger installations in the world. We have two instances controlling our Canada operation; it’s really Canada and the rest of the world. It was suggested that we spin up the second instance, but we really haven't seen a good reason for doing that, other than we keep some of the competing lines of business separated. Other than that, it seems to scale really well and we can keep going with it.

Tech support, as I’ve mentioned, has been great. I know that CA has kept some people in support for a very long time, so they're very comfortable with the product. They know how the thing works. They know if it ever makes a particular hiccup, what's exactly causing that. We actually are on the Platinum support program, so we have a dedicated support resource. Historically, that person has been outstanding. He's always just a phone call away. He's knowledgeable not only about the product but our environment. Based on that, he can do a really, really good job for us.

Before I came to my current job, I was actually an independent consultant. The last job I worked before I came to work here was converting all the material into the system. I've been there since day one. Initial setup has always been really, really straightforward. Architecturally, the solution make sense. There's a very good separation of functions and features. The security is outstanding and because the solution is English language-based, we don't really need to go out and put in a lot of infrastructure support to do the normal stuff. Basically, if you want a job to run on Tuesday, you simply tell it, run on Tuesday, and it miraculously works.

We were in a situation where we had one of everything and we really went out to do a consolidation in the solutions that we were using. We really saw the CA solution as something that would give us the reliability and the scalability to move us forward in the future. We really didn't see that from a lot of the other solutions in the industry, so we chose them.

When we are selecting a vendor, the support is really the first and foremost criteria, and then I guess support going forward, so, the development organization: How are they addressing changes in the industry, changes in the solution? That sort of thing.

Look really hard at what your requirements are today. Know that you're going to have a solution that you're going to be able to stick with for as long as you care to stick with it; also, something that can address audit requirements, address things like scalability, and usability. If you have to become an expert on how to make the product work and use it, then it's probably not as usable as you need it to be. Look for something that you can talk to, like you were talking to your little brother, and move forward from there.

The reasons for my rating are usability, reliability, and scalability of the solution.