AutoSys Workload Automation Reviews

A strong aspect of our current use case is to provide integration with the Zeke mainframe scheduler and enable cross platform job dependencies between the two worlds.

Self-Service can enable the support team to move from being a bottleneck to being the go-to team for expertise and advice and to focus on maintaining the infrastructure.

Granular Security enables self-service role-based access. JIL language is always a big accelerator for creating/editing job flows efficiently.

Great at handling timezones and daylight savings adjustments.

Despite the commitment of the development team to improve the UI since version 11.3, the WCC module still lacks true quality. There are still too many screens and the use cases need to be handled in a more "compact" way. I have not seen the v12 product yet.

Note that this product is now a legacy product with a dwindling user base and support.

Do not consider for a green site implementation

We've been using v11.3.6 for years, and the tool in general since 2006.

We've had no issues with the stability.

We've had no trouble scaling it for our needs.

Customer Service:

The user conference used to be a great way to catch the attention of the development and product management team. Sadly, these are a thing of the past.

Technical Support:

Technical support has noticeably gone down since the Broadcom takeover of CA. A lot of the knowledge base is now on line and the expectation is that users self-support with that. The level of depth that the support organisation provides is not as deep as previously. We have not experienced any emergency situations though, so can't comment on that.

The initial setup was not hugely complicated, but do set aside four to six man-months if you are not using specialist services. The product does require some careful thinking around the High Availability and security sides. Thorough qualifications testing is recommended for a scheduler, too.

If you don't buy competence, you will need to build it internally which takes time. The recent versions of the product are a lot more complex than the relatively simple 4.0.

Legacy product with dwindling user base and support.

Get some specialist help if you don't have internal knowledge.

This product is now legacy.

Without this product we would have to manually submit jobs and it would take longer. There would also be a much greater possibility of jobs running wrong and/or not at the right time.

The scheduling feature allows us to know when jobs are going to run and makes sure they run in the order needed.

Because this product only computes processing days, it is hard when things need to be scheduled according to non-processing days. 

Some of the reports are either a bit hard to understand or don’t give you what you might expect to see.

No issues.

No issues.

Tech support is excellent, especially if you have a problem that gets bumped to level-two people. The level-two people are great at figuring out what happened and what you do next.

We switched from Burroughs to IBM, previously.

Complex, but we have a complex schedule.

I’m not involved in this aspect.

Yes, IBM’s solution.

Get on the community. Ask questions.

• 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.

It's a pretty solid product. The stability of it is probably its best feature. Also, the newer versions are going to have extended job numbers.

It's our hub for all our job scheduling, so basically everything we do goes through there.

Upgrades to the GUI interface would be probably one of the biggest things they could do to improve. With the up and coming youth of today, they want to be on a GUI instead of on a mainframe, so a better GUI interface would probably be the best upgrades they've had. Plus the CLI could be improved.

We've had no issues with deployment since implementing it.

One of the biggest strengths is the stability of the product.

No, not really. We've had no issues with scaling it.

Technical support is very good. They're always on top of things.

My advice would be to compare CA to BMC. We did, and found CA to be the better product.

In our current environment, we have a large community of users. So Workload Automation helps us with our complex job scheduling with automating placements.

I believe it's a mission-critical application that is required within the company because everything requires to be scheduled. Everything needs to move. In today's economy, everything is 365-24/7.

In all aspects of the company, whether you're in the actual trading or in the wholesale or retail space, you're our internal client and we treat you like a customer. Ultimately, we're in operations.

It needs more complex scheduling capabilities on the end points. For that to happen, you really need the next version of AutoSys that has the ability to do that. We used it as an opportunity to test out what that next version going to look like, so when we deployed enterprise-wide, we had a little bit of understanding of how it's going to work.

Also, it shouldn't take longer than six months to do a deployment. I heard good things about being portable, meaning CA is able to introduce a lot of agents as packages on top of your existing environment that you're going to add. That's some of the good things that I'm hearing and I'm looking forward to seeing those because our business requirements always expand.

I'd also like to see iDASH integration with monitoring, which I think is up and coming.

I've used it for almost 3 years.

I've had no issues deploying it.

We've had stability issues, but CA's pretty prompt about fixing things for us. We've had commonly-known bugs that are fixed after an upgrade.

It's been scalable. Architecture-wise, it's pretty robust, and we've been able to work it out with CA. We run over 10,000 jobs a day.

Technical support is relatively on the upper hand of some of the companies that we deal with because we do have dealings with our account management team. When we have a major deployment, the support team is made fully aware of that. If, for example, if we're doing a deployment on the weekend, we have a 1-800 number that we can call. It's been great.

For the original implementation, I wasn't involved, but we are moving to a newer release. We have built an environment where I was involved. Complexity-wise, it's more or less a specific business requirement that we needed.

At this moment, we've been pretty long-term customer with CA. I don't think there's any product out there that we're going to be willing to switch out at the moment, given what their customer base is, what the capabilities of the product and how it fits into our model.

We use it for running jobs of workload automation, specifically bad jobs.

The flexibility and the scalability that it can be used from the back-end. It is very user friendly.

It is more scalable. We run around 100K jobs on a daily basis. To manage that much workload on the system, it is very reliable in terms of the uptime on the system.

The scalability could be improved upon. According to the roadmap, this should be addressed in upcoming features.

The emailing feature that we have, when there is a figure, you fill it in. This should be an emailing feature that is enabled.

It had downtime, but Sevis has been very supportive in that aspect.

We run about 100K jobs on a daily basis, so this adds up to having more critical customers in terms of reliability.

We have used the Techno Global support when we have had issues. 

I was not a part of the initial setup.

I would recommend this solution.

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.

• Top-notch scheduling features and functionality
• Reliability, performance and stability
• Advanced GUI to manage the batch, flexibility to schedule jobs on various business needs

• Improved batch processing with PROD monitoring to take corrective actions on batch issues
• Implemented scheduling predecessors/successors conditions

I would like to see advancement in predictive analysis, trending and reporting.

I have used it for 20+ years.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is excellent.

We previously used a different solution. We consolidated into a strategic scheduling product because it is easier to manage and operate.

Initial setup is complex. It requires technical skills in various flavors of distributed/enterprise H/W, S/W, databases to implement, configure and develop high-availability options.

Review licensing calculation is based on criteria. I recommend not to license based on the number of jobs.

We evaluated other options, including Maestro, CA7, and Control M, to name a few.

Look for industry trends, overall deployment, scale and scope, features and functionality and vendor support structure/relationship.