AutoSys Workload Automation Reviews

• 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.

Over time we have found that if there are any issues with communication between the various components [ scheduler (eventor) ,app server (as_server) , database (event server), the agents, etc ] that when connectivity is restored, jobs start executing as desired and anything that is stuck or is in an ‘strange state’ is easily found and rectified using the tools provided by autosys.

We have found that most of the time the WorkLoadAutomationAE software requires very little maintenance and has achieved an almost 100% uptime in all the instances we have running in our DEV/TEST/and PROD environments.

IOW – Although there are many components involved, once things are setup correctly, the application performs solidly, is extremely redundant (again, if setup correctly) and has very little maintenance overhead.

We've just recently upgraded to the 11.3.6 Workload Automation platform. We're still implementing the pieces, but what we found is, there's a lot more reporting with it. It's a lot more stable. There are a lot more features available, that we've yet to even take advantage of.

When we first went to 11.3.6, they didn't have their agent monitoring platform produced. As of this date, we haven't even installed their agent orchestrator yet. We're trying to work to get those in. I can't specify what I would like right now, unfortunately, because we haven't fully implemented the product, so I don't know what's missing.

They have a lot of great features; these new job types that we've yet to even start implementing. Some of that's going to require some philosophical change on how we promote the code, so I don’t have hard information on it. I would just say to CA, stay on the roadmap.

My opinion, from what I've seen, is, when we started with 11.3.6 service pack 0, the initial release (now they're up to service pack 5), I've seen them address all my concerns regarding, how do we manage the agents from a centralized location and all? I think they're on the right track, but at this point, I can't say, "Wow, they're missing this key feature.", because they seem to have everything that I've been thinking about in the pipeline.

When we started the new product and we introduced it, we started getting some new alarm types and the agent went offline. The architecture about how the scheduler monitors the agents, it knows when the agent on the workload server actually disappears and it reports that. I was talking to our service engineers and so forth, and I said, "You have an alarm that goes off, that says the scheduler's lost contact with server x's agent and it's logged in a log. When it recovers, that's logged in the log, but there's nothing from an alert perspective." Basically, you have a system that alerts you when there's a problem, but doesn't alert you when it's resolved.

I said, "We don't look at AutoSys, or in this case, Workload Automation, to be the correlation engine for what we escalate, but if you're going to put out an alarm that says the sky is falling, I've lost contact with an agent, and you log that in your log." I kind of said, "It would be nice if you put out the same type of information alert, that shows that it cleared, since the log of the application shows that. You're basically saying, the sky is falling and then when the sky is caught, you don't alert us that it's all better.”

It caused a little confusion since our NOC is reaction based. We see the alert and then when it clears, they don't see that it cleared, so we have to do additional work. I've talked to CA about it. They said, "It's an interesting idea. We'll take it under advisement.", because it's not a bug, it's more like undocumented features.

What I like about the product is, we've had issues at the infrastructure level, regarding components that stopped seeing each other, or they got out of sync regarding, say, the database communications. Once the system reestablishes itself, you don't have to worry about if something happens in your infrastructure regarding, “Oh my God, my jobs are going to get out of sync.” The system does a really good job of piecing current status together and giving you accurate results. That's a good stability piece.

Our implementation is not that huge on it. It's a couple of small instances of Workload Automation that do a lot of work. From a scalability perspective, I enjoy the fact that, when we scale our networks – we have our servers that actually perform the work out in disparate parts of the company – we don't have to bring the whole infrastructure in. The application server layer of the product line really allows you to centralize the control, without having to have direct, direct contact to every single component out there. It's a nice tiered approach. I see it that the scalability is in line with where I see our company going.

Interestingly enough, with technical support, it's a huge company, so even though you have a one-to-one relationship with, maybe, your professional services or your account manager, when you call support, they don't really have that history. I found that, with a lot of companies, you're concerned about, I have to start with a tier-one person, I have to re-explain my problem.

What I've experienced with CA, over the last, say, 2-3 years that I've actually worked with them directly and their product, is, they understand that. I've actually gotten very good results, because it's not just a technical part that they see. I think that CA and their technical support for this product understands the human condition that's involved, the concerns. I don't have to worry that, if I have an issue, I have to justify my concerns about my support issue. They understand that and they address it proactively, which, for the most part, gives me an overall good customer experience using their support.

We just recently upgraded our Workload Automation. We went from 4.5.1 to 11.3.6. I think we did about an eight-year jump, in one fell swoop. It was nice to be able to help work with their teams to architect this solution in our upgrade, where we actually brought in our business needs. It wasn't just, “Hey, we're just going to replace it and move it forward.” That’s kind of like what we did, because we wanted to keep the solution as transparent to the end users that use it. We worked with the company and came up with something that makes sense for us.

Based on my experience, make sure you ask a lot of questions and advocate for what your business needs are. When you get your solution, investigate it. Don't just say, like CA, like any other vendor says, "This product can do x, y and z." Don't take that at face value. Ask the right questions, because I find that in technology, especially what I experience, when people talk about what my needs are and what my product can do, sometimes they're using the same words with different meanings based on the perception of the user or the context of the conversation.

I'm thinking, be clear, especially if you're on the technical piece. If you're going to be supporting this, ask a lot of questions, because what I found is, after the implementation of this product, it's kind of hard to go back and re-architect it and things like that. Advocate for yourself, but it's a fine product. I advocate for it all the time to everybody, because it does what it needs to do.

I think that the product has so many moving parts and so many features that it's a plethora of great stuff, whether it gets implemented for a specific vendor really depends on the vendor’s needs. I think it's a fabulous product that you can really fine tune for what your specific business needs are. It's scalable, it can grow. You don't have to worry about re-buying a hundred different things.

To me, if you do it right, it's very easy to manage, which is great. My team that I work with, we've been working with this product for eight years now and we were talking about it and somebody says, "The great thing about this product is, when there's an issue, you don't have to worry about picking up all the pieces and figuring out what happened." The system kind of comes back online, makes the reports that you need.

The most valuable features are helping to schedule jobs and helping to watch for data set triggers.

A benefit of the solution is scheduling multiple jobs. We run 5,000 jobs a day, so it helps us to keep all of that in order; keep all the dependencies, everything, flowing in the right direction; any kind of events, getting all those alerts and anything that could help with making things faster; not keeping anything behind.

• Maybe just new ways to schedule things
• Maybe a little bit more options for scheduling
• More keywords

Things like that. That would help.

It's very reliable. I haven't had a lot of problems with it; working through the schedule; making changes; simulating; making things work.

We've had a couple problems and we've written in to them or called in to them, and they have been very responsive, helping us solve the problems. It might take a day or two, or a week, but they're always very helpful.

Recently, we had a problem with our WOBTRIGs failing because the servers and different things were having updates to them, and it would be pulled away from workload automation.

Kiki actually helped us to put some more information in to restart the WOBTRIGs more than just once and that was all we were doing. Since we've put that into our product, we have not had any more abends with this.

We knew it was time to invest in a new solution because we were having multiple abends every day. We were having like 5-10 abends every day, and we would have to restart them continuously. We talked to CA support, and they were telling us that that's not right and that we needed to add some new parameters to help with this process. We thought it was something on our side, and we did check with our guys on our floors with the different windows, the different agents. It turned out it was just something that could be fixed in ESP.

Anything new is a little bit complex. It's a great tool, now that I've learned it; just at first, just the learning curve of learning the tool; doing some things wrong, but it is a great tool and it has helped us; a lot better than our previous scheduler.

The management went out and looked at different tools and brought them in, and we looked at different things because we were wanting to run across multiple platforms. TWS couldn't do that. It was mainly a mainframe and when we were really branching out to the different distributed platforms, we needed a tool that would cover all of them and ESP was that.

My advice to others depends on what they're looking for, too, in a tool. If they need something like we did to go across multiple platforms, I think it's great, but I have nothing to compare it to except TWS. But I think this is a great tool, and I think it solves the problem for us anyway. It's a great tool.

It's a great tool. I really like working with it. Now that we've got it and had it, it's very easy to use. I think it's easy for other people to use, too, because we had to work a lot of kinks out at first. A lot of our stuff came straight from TWS over to CA, and we just did a transition of straight over. We didn't rework the whole schedule, so we did have to work out some problems with it just to begin with. Now that we've got things smoothed out, it's great.

In our use, I really enjoy things being in one spot. It's extremely easy to use. It's easy to set up. It's easy to upgrade.

Most of the time, it's easy to teach people how to use it. My developers a lot of the times get in there really quickly and they're all able to make an impact quickly.

There are a lot of benefits. Automating things is the future. You get to be efficient.

I'm in retail, so a lot of times, we do a lot of different jobs. You have one person doing what three people normally do. The only way you can really function is if you automate things.

It's beautiful because I can schedule things in a hundred different ways. There's generally always a solution to things with some sort of scheduling.

There has been preaching about cross-application critical pathing. It's extremely difficult for us to tell what is impacting what other items. I would absolutely love to be able to click one job and see all of its dependencies, regardless of which application that it's in, through externals. I've had a hard time getting traction on that. It was supposed to be in the most recent release, but got pulled in favor, I believe, of the web GUI. I would absolutely love to see cross-application critical pathing.

There are a couple things that they could do to make my life a little easier. Analytics seems to be a problem, so a couple of stars deducted for that, but it's probably one of the easiest tools that I manage.

It's pretty stable. In the eight years I've been doing this, I've had three major outages. One of them was self-inflicted. One of them, I'm not really sure what happened. The other one was, the database ran out of resources.

We're expected be up all the time, 24/7/365. I'm always available. Really the only time I've had outages were some sort of hardware failure. The product itself has always been very, very stable, and extremely easy to upgrade. We've been able to keep it up-to-date and make sure that we're able to take care of it.

One specific thing is, we've all moved to Oracle Exadata. I am probably one of the few systems that handles all of the database node rolling really, really well. It freezes for a couple of seconds, and then it comes right back. Every time they're like, "We're doing maintenance. We have to shut down nodes." I'm like, "That's fine; we're good. You don't even have to tell me about it. It will take care of it."

The system is very, very stable and reliable.

Scalability just depends; it depends on how much you want to spend.

The beauty of some of the product is that they license by agent. Our ETL agent runs thousands of jobs on one server, so we don't have to pay per job. Generally, when they need to put in a hundred new ETL jobs, it's no big deal. We put it in, it runs, everything runs well and does what it's supposed to do.

Generally, with first-level support, I tend to know more than they do, so it's a little bit painful. We've had some challenges with it.

At this point, when I have major problems, I've just started calling my product managers to get help with it. I guess a positive is that I don't have to call technical support very often because it's stable and it works.

I was not involved with the original setup.

I have done an entire migration and upgrade of the newer one. We started out with 11.1. That was already in place when I joined the team.

The 11.3 upgrades and everything after that, I have done. I have to say, it is probably one of the easiest tools that I have to upgrade, especially once they moved to 12.0 and they started doing in-place upgrades.

The last time when we did the migration, we got our Linux Gold Standard. This time around, all I had to do was push a couple buttons and my entire outage was 24 minutes.

Do your homework. Talk to other workload automation people. Get their feel for it and find out what has worked for them and hasn't worked for them.

I had to learn things the hard way. I now have this amazing network of workload automation people. They're engaged and they want to help you. Talk to them and make everything a little bit easier on yourself.

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.

The valuable feature is that it is mainframe.

We did not have the visibility of the distributed jobs until we used ESP Workload automation and we can now schedule them together with our mainframe jobs.

We've had stability problems with the tool.

It is scalable, but we're probably not using it to the best of our ability. We might be migrating to CA Workload Automation iDash.

I haven’t used technical support, but one of my coworkers has used them and she’s happy with them.

I was involved with the installation. At first, I found it to be complex, but now I think it's pretty user-friendly.

We were looking at IBM. Because our industry was growing as far as using servers, CA was a better fit.

I would recommend this product to others.