AutoSys Workload Automation Reviews

Usually what we end up doing with Workload Automation is, we have a lot of different jobs: different batch scripts, PHP scripts, everything that we need to run at specific times in chains, with banner-related instances, which means different database connections. We need all the stuff to happen, we need to know that it's going to happen, and if it doesn't we need to make sure that we get logs as to why. That's usually the general work case that we have.

It's performed very well. I think right now the one issue that we're having is we have a lack of documentation on it and the different jobs that are inside of it. But the platform itself is working very well.

The most valuable feature is probably just the robustness of the platform itself, where you can go in and put any code inside of it and, as long as the server that you have it running on has the legs to be able to execute all that, it's good to go.

We don't have to manually run things anymore. We can have the work that a team of 50 people would do, all inside of one platform.

Again, lack of documentation, that is an issue. When we do need to bring it down for maintenance, it is always a scary moment for us because we have never had it crash. When we don't have any documentation, we don't really know what to expect if we do have to bring it down but there haven't really been any issues with it.

I'm probably not the right one to ask about features for upcoming versions mostly because we are using an old version of this product. However, if I had to, I'd probably say that it would be really nice if it had the ability to see, on a more top-level scale, what's going on inside of the system. Right now it is very granular. You do have to get very deep into the system to see what jobs are happening, when they're happening, how they're happening, if anything's failed. If they could have a more high-level view of that, that would be really nice.

I gave it an eight out of 10 because we are using an older version right now. I'm sure the newer version that they have is really great. 

The thing that's preventing us from upgrading to the latest version is personnel resources. We don't have enough staff. I think after this conference (CA World) we're probably going to be setting up new servers to go ahead and update. With that, we have a lot of financial related things on our version, so shifting everything over to the new version is going to take a lot of time. We don't know exactly how it's going to be different.

It is very stable. We haven't had it go down yet so that's very nice, that's always good. We've been using it about 10 years now and we've never had any crashes.

We haven't had any issues. If we need more space, we just throw more space on the servers. If we need to have it connect to more databases or more services, there really is no issue with it.

We have used it before, however, we haven't really needed it too much. Usually, most of the issues that we would have, you can find documentation about them somewhere online. We also know that there are other universities in Georgia that use this product so we usually end up reaching out to them before we have any other issues.

When choosing a vendor, since we're a university, what is important is the cost, and then who does it benefit. Is it going to benefit the student body? If it does, perfect. It does benefit the employees, perfect. Other than that, are there any other people, any other companies that offer something similar, and what do they do. Outside of that, how hard is it going to be for us to bring them on and what does a company do with the data that we give them. That is a very important piece. If we have to give student data to that system, does that student data go anywhere? If it does, that violates federal laws, things like that.

As far as advice, make sure that you document everything. As you're setting it up, work closely with other universities, figure out what best cases are going to be, best practices. Really just have a deep understanding of what you are wanting to do with it, what jobs that you want it to do, what processes are you wanting to map out.

We schedule overnight and daily jobs, mainly on a Cc&B system. We do file transfers from outside agencies, things like financial pledges and meter readings.

It performs very well. As far as the product is concerned, all of our issues are really with the system that we call rather than with the AE product itself. 

We were able to eliminate an overnight operator job, for one thing. He just left, but we did not replace him.  We get better reports than we use to have. Basically it runs jobs on a schedule, but we already had the jobs. It also eliminates manual job starting.

Its scheduling and its notification to us. We need to know when things are taking too long and when it fails, but we really need to schedule jobs to run. We need to have things run in a very sequential order, so it is very useful that we can schedule the work flows.

There is a difference between a web interface and the thick client interface. We particularly like a thick client interface, and it has gone away. I am finding that is disappointing to me. Now, it looks like the web interface is where all the development is going, which means it will become more full-featured than any thick clients that might be compatible with the new version. I would hate to see the thick client be left behind. I would really like to see that thick client come along.

I would really like to see a feature where if you have a variable object and you reference it anywhere, in any object or script, that you could somehow click on it and resolve the value and display it.

This is one thing I would really like to see in a new release of it. I have no idea if that has already been implemented or not, because we do not have the latest version, but I would really like to see something like that.

As far as I can tell, it is stable. We are just transferring to the AE version, but we were using Automation Manager for two years before that. 

I can't recall the actual product failing in any way. 

The tool can probably handle way bigger stuff than what we are doing. 

We are a gas distribution company, but we also own other companies. We are only using this at one of our locations where there are several million customers. We are firing off jobs that are billing those customers, managing meter readings, and various other billing-related financials and lettering processes. We are not at a Netflix or American Airlines level. I am pretty sure we have way more capacity in the product then what we are using. 

I do not think that I called technical support, though I think we have reported a software bug. There is one bug that we noticed, which is kind of annoying. So, aside from that, I do not think we used technical support at all.

I have looked up stuff on the CA Community. I might have gone into some of the Community pages to look for a solution. Nothing really memorable though.

Since we are still using the AE product and we are just transferring into it, we are still talking to the consultants, the people who actually came in and sold it to us, installed it, and trained us. So, we still have those as resources at this time. We have not really needed the Community.

As I recall, there is a transfer application from our AM to our AE. That went very well. Any problems that we had with that we probably caused ourselves, because we wanted to rename a lot of stuff, which was probably a bad idea, but I could not control that. 

I think it was relatively smooth. It could have been smoother. I do not think it was a fault of the program. I think it was more our fault. 

I would recommend it. Actually I do not even know another automation product. I would not know what else to recommend.

I appreciate training and support from a vendor. They should come in, train us on the product, and be around for a while, or at least available, to help us with anything we should have learned or did not. Or, things we discover we need. Training and early on support are really important and we really would like to see, like the same person providing it. 

I would like to be able to contact him and say, "Hey, how do I do such and such? How do I attach this report to this thing? How do I filter this?" And he would reply with, "Here are some codes you might find useful." I know these would be available out in the community, but I should not have to look it up because I am still in training. That is just one thing I would like.

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?

Enterprise job scheduling.

It has helped to simplify cross-dependency between MVS and Open systems jobs.

Also adding new agents is easy, scheduling is easier and faster.

• Enterprise cross-platform scheduling
• MVS scheduling

We have couple of hundred thousand jobs scheduled monthly via ESP so it is critical.

Reduce the number of operational files. This would make the job of a system programmer supporting ESP easier. In the present design, there are too many operational files to maintain.

No issues with stability.

No issues with scalability.

I would rate them nine and a half out of 10. CA technical support is doing a great job.

We had to choose an alternate scheduling tool.

It is relatively simple.

Great tool, excellent technical support, stable product.

Mostly its stability.

With requirements, they have "always" and "skip" on them. That would be nice, for them to have it on triggers also. So, if a customer says, "I want to demand this output, only these certain triggers," the scheduler could shut it off.

It's very, very stable. We've never had any problems with it.

I would give scalability a 10 out of 10.

We've used it for a couple of questions when we didn't know the answers. They were great, and very informative. We've even used it for CA Datacom. And since I was a newbie doing upgrades with that, they pretty much held my hand through it, and gave me different suggestions. So, thumbs up to them.

The one that we actually support is the CA-7 Edition for the scheduling package. It's very, very stable, always has been. And we rarely have any problems with it, so that's great.

The important criteria when selecting a vendor include

• that it works with other products
• stability, definitely
• and that it works great in DR.

If I were to advise someone who is looking at this kind of solution, I would say always look at multiple products, and decide from there. I would tell themabout the staple we've had with the CA-7 here, some people may say it's old, pre-historic, but it works great for us.

Batch operations. Running our insurance systems.

It is wonderful. It's been everything we expected it to be.

• It gives us higher accuracy rates and faster performance of our batch processes.
• Higher reliability of our business processes. 

Reliability is a big one. When I go home at night I sleep well because I trust that the product will perform its design.

It has allowed us to automate many of the functions of our operations staff. 

For instance, we had production control staff spending two hours a day entering date parms into our daily business processes. And now, CA Workload Automation does it for us.

I am looking forward to more of their dashboard features. I think it would be very valuable for us to have dashboard features that could be delivered to our customers in the form of a URL, and they could refresh that URL whenever they wanted to get up to date performance metrics out of our systems. 

There have been a couple hiccups along the way, but then I call support and we always iron out any stability issues. It is a 24 x 7 operation product and it's highly stable.

We're currently crossing over into another insurance underwriting software product, and I see no problems with it being able to scale into this new product area.

I love those guys at tech support. In fact, I recently had a call where someone was concerned that I was upset, so they even had someone else call me to discuss with me how I felt about my call. I was not upset, but I appreciated their follow-through.

They are highly knowledgeable. They seem to be product experts.

Our old solution was losing its ability to scale. As our organization was changing, we needed a product that could change with us, and CA Workload Automation seems to be the right tool.

We chose this product for its scalability and its reliability, and the fact that it can run our business solutions on multiple platforms, in concert with one another. It can run an object on our Windows systems or our Unix systems, and then send messages to the other system when they are complete.

It was complex, but we also hired Automic business support staff to come and assist, and they helped us get through all the complexities, very easily.

We evaluated other products, but it was several years ago.

When selecting a vendor it really centers around the product reliability for us, and we saw that in this product.

I actually sat by several people today, here at the CA World conference, that were saying they were here just to evaluate this product. I mostly told them some of my personal success stories and shared with them, that it has been a wonderful tool for automating our business needs, and that they should really consider this product.

Our challenge is having a centralized schedule on a single pain with 180,000 jobs each day. We are looking to move to iDASH with predictive analytics. We don’t have many SLA’s. We're looking to do better with predictive analytics and we want to further integrate.

We were using a lot of homegrown stuff. This solution provides us with more details on jobs failing. It also gives us restorability. For the last 10 years, it's become more complex, but it's also bridged our platforms and gave us the ability to recover.

I'd like to see automation pushed even further, giving us greater looks into other systems. I'd like more enhanced process automation and have it manage a few more platforms without relying on another orchestration platform.

We've used it for 10 years.

We've had no issues with deploying it.

It's stable. It’s so busy finding maintenance windows, and we are currently going through exercises.

We can leverage multiple servers with ease.

Technical support is knowledgeable and I don’t have a whole lot of complaints. We don’t get the run around.

We had already had some other CA technologies, so it was a good fit and we knew what we were dealing with.

Initial setup and upgrades were straightforward.

Understand your needs, don’t complicate it, and understand what you are looking for. You don’t want to create an automated mess.

The most valuable features of AutoSys Workload Automation are the file transfer protocol and file watcher. The solution has a user-friendly user interface. It is very simple to use. You have a scope of all your jobs, jobs are what you call tasks that you will automate in the solution. It lets you monitor everything in these jobs.

AutoSys Workload Automation could improve in the Linux environment. The previous versions of the AutoSys Workload Automation let you take the profile of the user that you were using to run the tasks that you're going to automate, but in the latest versions, you can't do that, you need to make more definitions and it's a little bit difficult. It was easier in the previous versions.

In an upcoming release, AutoSys Workload Automation could include more integrations capabilities. I have seen other tools that have native integrations with other tools, such as Docker and other services in the cloud. They are not taking this into account in AutoSys Workload Automation.

I have been using AutoSys Workload Automation for approximately two years.

We have approximately 15 administrations who use this solution, but the tool is made to work for all the infrastructure of the organization, we could have more users.

The technical support is great, they have helped us a lot.

The initial configuration of AutoSys Workload Automation was simple. When you need to make a migration from previous versions or from other tools, it's easy. There are some complexities, but it is not something that is impossible, it can be very simple.

I rate AutoSys Workload Automation an eight out of ten.