Control-M Reviews

I am using Control-M for cloud infrastructure and automation-related tasks. As a cloud engineer, my work involves scheduling, deploying, managing, and monitoring processes for infrastructure and workflows. It is integrated with a CI/CD toolchain as part of our DevOps culture.

I am using the cloud version. I am using Helix Control-M.

Control-M has good integration capability. It integrates well with all the solutions. It also has good reporting capabilities.

Control-M has improved our organization's functions by supporting high availability and integrating with CI/CD workflows. It helps maintain high availability and manage workflows across the production environment, increasing our productivity.

Additionally, Control-M has offered broad-level exposure that has increased our efficiency. Our workflows run smoothly. Everything is easy. We have had very positive feedback.

Control-M is fine to integrate with our DevOps toolchain. It is neither difficult nor easy.

Control-M made it more simple to create, integrate, and automate data pipelines across on-premises and cloud technologies. It is very comprehensive.

Control-M provides workflow orchestration, including scheduling, deploying, managing, and monitoring workflows. It helps us meet our service-level agreements. It is integrated into our CI/CD pipeline. It enhances our operational productivity.

The UI can be challenging for new users due to its learning curve. Additionally, there are some errors during automation. More detailed logs would be helpful.

We would also like enhanced API support. The APIs should be more comprehensive.

I have been using Control-M for almost two and a half years.

Control-M is stable so far, with no issues regarding crashing or lagging.

Control-M is very scalable. It can absorb more workload wherever needed.

We have had occasional response issues with their customer service. They do not always provide timely support.

Neutral

We have used Redwood RunMyJobs and Apache Airflow. Control-M offers more features under one umbrella. It has cloud-native support, real-time analytics, and other features.

The initial setup was challenging due to network setup issues and a lack of timely support from the service team. Its implementation took about a month. We did not have any downtime.

We did the deployment in-house without using an integrator or consultant.

Pricing is generally affordable, though some features cost a bit more.

New users should familiarize themselves with the tools and undergo training. It is essential to understand the necessity of using Control-M in your organization. I would recommend starting with your workflows and gradually integrating it with all the tools.

I would rate Control-M an eight out of ten.

Control-M is a job scheduler. You can schedule FTP jobs or use scripts within Control-M. You can also execute commands when necessary to schedule, or you can just run a script that is hosted on a server. Based on the schedule, you can orchestrate or automate jobs. You can set dependencies between jobs. You can correlate and create a sequence of your jobs and execute them in the order you wish. You can set the variables and options that you like. You can set the prerequisites and post-job activities after the completion, such as reports analysis, emails, etc.

Helix Control-M is critical for us. If we do not have a job scheduler like this, we will have to have people running 366 different jobs on a daily basis and 24 hours a day. These are the jobs that we run from midnight to midnight every single day on a scheduled basis.

I do not use Helix Control-M's Python client or Airflow. I am using the web client. I do not create jobs. I give my users access to create their own jobs. I just maintain the agents and keep the administration going. When they have questions, they come up to me and ask. We just use the web interface to go into the planning mode and create our jobs, folders, dependencies, etc.

Control-M has helped to give business users visibility and control over their jobs. Both Control-M and Helix Control-M allow me to give users control over their own set of jobs. They can log in and orchestrate their jobs as they want. They can also troubleshoot them on their own. It makes that easy. I just have to be hands-off and stand by in case they need assistance, but once the tool is deployed and every agent is up and running, it is easy. The people who have the jobs running or the job scheduled know about their own jobs. They know their own demands. They have control over the decision of when they are going to run it and how they are going to run it. It makes it very simple, and it helps.

You can set up your users and define whether they have admin privileges or they can just affect a set of jobs.

The fact that it is all centralized in the web browser makes it easily accessible from everywhere. All my users are IT people. They do different things. They do databases. They do informatics. They do development and things of that nature. To business users, such as board members of the company, we can give them reports on, for example, how the business closed and how much profits were there, or if all the transactions were submitted to the bank on time. If not, what were they missing? We can provide all things of that nature. We can pull it all up in a report and then schedule it on a daily basis or weekly basis. It is simple.

There have been cost savings with Helix Control-M. The license that the company was paying for Control-M, including support, was three grand more expensive than Helix Control-M. With Control-M, we also had to have an administrator dedicated to maintaining Control-M on-premises. That cost of having a person dedicated to doing just Control-M jobs is gone after we moved to the cloud. We are not only getting more money in savings; we are also making a better distribution and use of our time. By not having a dedicated person, we are saving a couple of grand. We are saving on the license and, of course, resources. We do not have to have dedicated resources such as servers. We do it virtually. We do not need to have resources reserved for the server and database. I just have to deploy the agent, which can run multiple instances in my cluster. They can share resources, which is another saving there.

In Helix Control-M, we have the automation API that allows us to customize and do integrations easily in any script, such as Java or Python. It is all integrated within the integration API.

Every year, they add another set of automation or compatibility with different applications. They are capable of integrating with Informatica, AWS, etc. You can schedule queries directly from Control-M on databases without having a server or agent. You can do scan jobs or queries directly. Every other month, they are doing releases, and they have tons of new integrations, which makes it compatible with more and more applications around the cloud.

They have a department that handles requests for enhancements. I talked to Control-M guys back in October or November when they had a gathering here in Atlanta. We talked about not being able to go back in history in Helix Control-M for more than two weeks. We submitted a request for enhancement. They told us that they are working on it, and they are thinking of expanding that to 30 days. We would like to see it expand to 90 days, but they are working on it. In Control-M, we were able to go back 180 days, but that was on-prem. The storage of that data was on our own servers. We know that storage is money, and we do not expect them to store that much of the data, but at least 30 to 60 days seem proper.

Community Loans of America has been using Control-M since version 6. It has been at least 10 years.

I have not had any downtime with Helix Control-M. All the upgrades are scheduled, and they give us a time window when they think they are going to schedule them, and we adjust. I have not seen anybody notice it. The jobs get held before the update, and they start automatically after the update. If anybody noticed it, that was because I had to tell them that a maintenance window was coming up and to be aware of it.

I contacted their support a couple of times to ask them about an error that I did not understand. They have three guys who are pretty handy. When you ask questions, you, of course, have to wait at least 24 hours for someone to respond. They are pretty fast. Most of my queries were responded to within the same day, which is great. I would, for sure, rate their support a solid 10 out of 10.

Positive

We were just using Control-M. We did not have any other scheduler. We migrated from Control-M to Helix Control-M. 

Control-M is on-premises, and it requires a dedicated administrator. Control-M has three major pieces. It has a Control-M server. It has a main agent, and it has a database. If you have HA, you will have the same things at a secondary location, so you will have to manage the cluster and make sure that all the pieces are working together. If, for some reason, one side fails, HA tries to recover in the second location. The management or the administration side of things is a challenge. It requires a dedicated person. Our main Control-M guy left us six years ago. Every time we had an issue with Control-M, it took us three or four hours to put it back where it should be. By migrating to Helix Control-M, our biggest success was getting away from the administration. Having Helix Control-M, which is a cloud product, allows us to use all the advantages of the job scheduler without handling the administration of our own servers.

If I compare Helix Control-M with what I had to do on Control-M on-prem, the process is very similar. The calendar has changed though. There was an advantage with Control-M that you could specify when was your new day load. Our new day load was every day at 9 AM in the morning. With Helix Control-M, we have to have only midnight as a new load because of the change of the date. It was a big challenge because we had to reorchestrate all the jobs to suit the new day load being moved from 9 AM to midnight. 

Essentially, scheduling a job or creating a new job requires the same effort in both applications. The advantage of Helix Control-M is that I do not depend on a single agent to pull FTP profiles. All of them are centralized. It does not matter which agent I am using. I have access to the whole list. In Control-M, FTP profiles had to be added to the agents that were being used. Helix Control-M has made it easy to orchestrate data pipelines in production because now, I do not have to worry about the whole backend of Control-M. I am sure that it is up to date, and I can log in reliably, load jobs, and orchestrate them as I need.

I once tried to migrate Control-M to something else called RunMyJobs. Compared to RunMyJobs, I would definitely go for Helix Control-M.

In terms of our environment, we are a mixed shop. The majority of our products are on-prem. We have a Nutanix cluster in our data center, and that is where we host the majority of our things. We have maybe one or two devices on AWS. For Azure, I know that we have a license because it comes with our enterprise Microsoft 365 license, but I do not recall having any hosting there.

For migration, they have a migration tool that makes it very easy. You can run this migration tool, and it will export all your current jobs in a JSON file. It will try to import them on the tenant in the cloud on Helix Control-M. We faced a few challenges here and there because at the time we did it, some features were missing in Helix Control-M or were not supported, but they were supported in Control-M. We used to have dual endpoint profiles for the MSP file transfer or the ASP. FTP jobs have profiles where the server address, user password, or key gets stored. In Control-M, you could have a single profile with two endpoints. You could have Host A and Host B in a single profile. That was not supported with Helix Control-M at the time we decided to migrate, so we had the challenge of converting all those dual endpoint profiles into single endpoint profiles to be able to be imported. I know for a fact now that it is no longer an issue because they now allow you to create dual endpoint profiles in Helix Control-M, but it was a challenge at the time.

Fixing things here and there and making it compatible took about six months. Those six months were not just because of how hard it was to migrate. It was a combination of the challenges of migration and other tasks that we have not been doing because we could not afford to have a person dedicated entirely only to Control-M. Effectively, the time dedicated exclusively to the migration was two and a half months, but the migration was distributed in a six-month calendar because of other duties and tasks that I had to perform.

We got help from VPMA. VPMA is our reseller. We purchased a license of Control-M through VPMA, and they have support and all that. We get help from them. They helped us to run the Orchestrator or the migration tool from BMC. They told us where the odd points were, and then we went to do it on our own. We came back and reviewed them again and kept fixing them.

Overall, we had three people. We had one person from VPMA, and then there was me and one of my technicians to assist me.

It is not bad. The company can afford it, and it pays for itself. We have those jobs running automatically.

I would rate Helix Control-M a 10 out of 10. I like Helix Control-M. 

My use case with Control-M spans three different organizations, primarily in the banking domain throughout my experience, working with major banks. Now I am in the telecom industry, where major telecom companies use Control-M for their operations.

The best features in Control-M include the ability to schedule scripts at any time, and if they are not running, there is an option to run them again without any manual intervention in case any execution fails, plus you can get failure logs and alerts directly if a job fails. 

It's a user-friendly tool. I've used other solutions which are not as user-friendly. It's easy to understand.

It is simple to integrate Control-M with technologies for your data operations and DevOps processes, especially as we upgrade this tool to the latest versions, providing more options for integration with cloud solutions. It is not very challenging if you are skilled with Control-M and integration aspects, such as using Control-M APIs to connect your applications and action on jobs or run scripts through API calls as well.

I see major improvements from Control-M, specifically since I started with version seven, and now we are on version 9.21. I have seen major changes, such as transitioning from a thick-client version to an online self-service version accessible through the Internet, alongside multiple UI changes.

Currently, there is room for improvement in the cost aspect compared to other tools. Control-M could be more user-friendly, and while it is user-friendly now, it can be improved to be more intuitive.

I have been using Control-M for the last ten years.

I experience very little downtime with Control-M and would rate its stability eight out of ten.

Regarding scalability, I would rate it around eight out of ten.

Control-M requires maintenance, and we need support from BMC; it would be beneficial if BMC invested more in providing customer support to users. 

I assess BMC services for helping my team with migrations and overall strategy as very good; when we raise cases to them, they help us understand and provide valuable feedback, and I would rate this support an eight out of ten. My relationship with BMC is more transactional.

Positive

I did not migrate from Broadcom, CA, Redwood, or any other similar solutions in any of those companies.

The deployment is a bit complex. 

It has saved us time and money.

When compared with other tools, Control-M is a bit costly. That said, it provides the best results, and since it is very user-friendly, investing in it gives you great outcomes. I'd rate the pricing seven out of ten.

If I compare Control-M with other solutions or vendors on the market, it stands out for its security and is the best in the market as of now due to its functionality and cost-effectiveness, which usually comes from the total number of executions in your organization, making it a great choice for daily activities.

I would recommend Control-M to other users. Although it is slightly more expensive on the market compared to other tools, it is very user-friendly and includes multiple features, such as integration with other applications. 

On a scale of one to ten, I rate Control-M a seven.

We predominantly use Control-M SAP R3 jobs. That's our primary batch job load with external vendors and internally on our AWS instance. That's our batch load alongside a few custom integrations. They are not public applications. It's all in-house applications. We have integrations and API integrations for the API hubs, which speak to multiple other applications within our next case.

It isn't the only point of failure, but Control-M handles our business-critical, priority-one applications. We have other options. Control-M runs the SAP side for all batches. The time needed to realize the benefits depends on the scale and complexity. 

One use case was in health care and involved shipment orders. With Control-M controlling the workflow, we could effectively monitor it and forecast any delays. This enabled us to deliver critical products in under four hours across hospitals in the network. 

We can apply the same standards and run the same set of jobs across environments. Once they are tested in the non-production environment, we can move them seamlessly to the production environment. 

We have a nightly process of batch reports. Before Control-M, we spent around 12 hours manually scheduling reports in SAP. After streamlining the process, we reduced manual work to nine and a half hours. The business could update all the processes before midnight.

While it doesn't totally free up IT personnel, it provides visibility into self-service tools where business users can see their pipelines or job streams. It would be read-only access for the business side, but to take action on the job, they still need to contact the IT team. 

Control-M doesn't facilitate collaboration between business and IT users, but It provides a better user experience. Both parties can see what they are talking about, so there's no black zone for any of the parties. Before Control-M, the functional team had a particular nomenclature to relate what they had seen on Control-M. With the self-service tool, they can simply relay the job name. The collaboration starts there, and it builds over with a lot of other parameters.

Control-M provides a centralized view of our enterprise workload. As the owner, I can access my dashboard and see the status of jobs across the enterprise. It is strong at integrating with different applications and creating a pipeline of dependencies across applications on different operating systems. 

When it comes to developments where we have to move across regions or environments, it seamlessly integrates and adapts to different regions. Regarding integration with the DevOps pipeline, it allows us to use a JSON file and promote it across environments easily. 

We use Control-M to deploy workflows for DataOps and DevOps initiatives. It allows us to quickly test workflows or configuration changes without much manual effort. We add the JSON file for the conversation parameters and let the system handle the schedule. Integrating other DevOps tools within the journey gives us the management perspective and approval of multiple pipelines.

I'm currently working on the SaaS version, but I've also worked on the on-prem versions before. There is a handful of features that haven't been added to the SaaS version, and the BMC knows that. It's a matter of time before they prioritize the missing pieces and bring them into the SaaS version. 

I started using Control-M back in 2018.

Control-M has the best stability in the market. They claim 99.99 percent availability. It's hardly four hours of downtime throughout the year.

Control-M is infinitely scalable. We only need to add agents. BMC will take care of it if you need anything on the SaaS side, but we can handle the rest using our agent architecture.

I rate BMC support 10 out of 10. They are stringent about their SLA timelines. They respond on time, and if it's a priority one, they will call immediately. 

Positive

We previously used the SAP Scheduler and adopted Dollar Universe. All our local manual efforts ran in  Windows Scheduler.

It was a greenfield approach, and I was there from day one as a consultant. Deploying Control-M can be easy or difficult, depending on what the business needs. It takes a while to understand the infrastructure setup our business needs and the number of jobs we need to run through this application. 

It took a while to understand the infrastructure setup we require. We had to understand the number of jobs running through this application and how business-critical they are. The documentation BMC provides is top-notch and covers every step we must follow. 

Migrating to Control-M is a bit tricky in terms of preparing the data and having the right tool to convert required parameters into a Control-M-ready job. Control-M has a feature called AMIGO that helps us migrate from the existing source.  Converting a job and loading it into our Control-M format isn't straightforward. We must do some prerecorded checks and setups before. 

There is some maintenance in the form of updating agents and deploying patches on the SAP application. Since it's a SaaS application, BMC handles most of the maintenance on the server side. 

The license model is based on the number of jobs we run on the SaaS application or the number of executions, unlike the on-premise model options. If we have a handful of jobs, it's always good to consider Control-M, but if it's a large number of jobs, Control-M might not be a great option. 

Control-M enables us to consolidate our jobs, and it helps us have a uniform approach and schedule. It helps to have the audit logs available. The scheduler space is nice in terms of control. 

We attempted to leverage ActiveBatch by Redwood and a few other options, but Control-M had all the features we needed. It gives us a 360-degree view of our implementation across silos. The architectural requirements also vary depending on the criticality of the applications. 

Control-M allows us to customize the job templates for any application we need, which covers all our future plans. Its integration speed is excellent because it has templates for every application. 

I rate Control-M 10 out of 10. New users will be fine if they follow the Control-M documentation. There's also a book you can buy on Amazon called "Batch Scheduling" that comprehensively covers batch operations and how BMC has evolved over time. 

In my company, we use Control-M as the main scheduling and automation tool for ETL processes. It orchestrates data flows from AIX servers to Linux and Windows platforms, integrates with Informatica PowerCenter for data transformation, and also manages dependencies with several network-based applications.

Control-M has significantly improved our organization by providing centralized scheduling and monitoring of ETL workflows. It allows us to automate complex job dependencies across different platforms, including AIX, Linux, and Windows. With Control-M, we can integrate seamlessly with Informatica PowerCenter for data transformation, ensuring that data pipelines run consistently and on time.

The first aspect is in real-time monitoring. Control-M has good visibility of thousands of jobs, and normally runs at the scheduled time. Control-M scheduling has always executed according to a different schedule, except when incidents occur, such as storage vapor.

I think Control-M has room for improvement because it should refresh more frequently.

I have been working in my current position for four months as a monitoring operator.

I would rate the stability of Control-M a 9.5 out of 10.

I would rate the scalability of Control-M at 9.5 out of 10.

I would rate technical support for Control-M at nine point five because it provides separate level error classification, which is a very important feature. The separate level error classification helps in determining the severity of issues.

Positive

Many engineers in our organization use Control-M, including both vendors and internal employees, approximately 100 in total.

I would rate Control-M overall a nine out of ten.

We use Control-M for batch automation. Previously, all of our batch work was manual, but now Control-M has significantly reduced the need for manual intervention. As a result, our batch processes are now 99% automated.

It's so easy to navigate, and especially for new hires, it's very straightforward to show them around the client because it is user-friendly. It's very easy to use. Compared to other softwares, Control-M has significantly simplified our monthly release process, making it easier to move things forward.

We're upgrading Control-M, and the process is very long. There are numerous boxes to tick and things to check to ensure everything is in order before the upgrade happens. We run three instances of Control-M, and making various changes for each is challenging.

I have been using Control-M for five years.

You might experience a brief connection issue, but it usually resolves within a few minutes. The problem is related to the web server.

Scalability is excellent. We utilize only about 20% of Control-M's capabilities. 

Support is helpful, and the online community is very good. There's the community forum, which I use regularly to find answers to questions. BMC has been very helpful in that space. They were extremely fast and solved a difficult problem our in-house team couldn't solve in a matter of minutes. 

Positive

The initial setup is straightforward. We used to use in-house software.

We have three different environments where people can work. People can use our development instance of Control-M to work on their batch processes before they go live, allowing them to experiment and refine until they get it right.

It's much simpler now. Everything was a manual batch job. Using the features of Control-M every day makes our batch processing so much easier.

It makes our lives so much easier. For our operations team, which runs our daily batch overnight, viewing everything as it happens has been an absolute lifesaver, especially if things go wrong overnight. It's great to have that visibility. It has also sped up our process, reducing overhead and weekend overtime. Batch processing is much quicker now, resulting in fewer manual errors.

Control-M has so much functionality that even if you initially purchase it to handle a specific part of your batch work, it can offer much more. We've progressed beyond traditional batch processing to include MFT, which has been incredibly useful. Our file watchers and other automation features have significantly simplified our workflows and made our lives much easier.

Overall, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

Control-M supports a lot of business processes. It supports some of the HR functions. I don't know if payroll is directly supported, but we do run jobs through PeopleSoft, which obviously impacts HR. Recently, we've started using the SAP module. So, we're making a transition from PeopleSoft to SAP, and I also see some payroll functions happening there.

We use Control-M to orchestrate a diverse landscape of vendor products such as Pega, MuleSoft, etc. File transfers and data feeds fetching are quite important for us. So, a lot of data processing happens through Control-M.

Control-M provides us with a unified view where we can easily define, orchestrate, and monitor all of our application workflows and data pipelines. Of course, such a diverse landscape requires you to make the effort to utilize Control-M to tie everything together or to act as the glue. Once you do that, everything is clearly defined, and you can view these disparate systems using one unified pane. If you don't define it correctly, then obviously Control-M won't have that insight, and so you'll have to go to multiple locations to go look at your job statuses.

We use its web interface. It is primarily for the application support teams to go monitor their own jobs. The jobs defined within Control-M are tightly controlled by a specific group of people. There are also people who need access to view that the jobs were completed successfully or why the jobs may have failed. These people are given access through Control-M web to view and monitor the jobs that they support or the applications they support. They're usually able to log on without having to install any client on their personal workstations. So, it's quite convenient. We have not implemented its mobile interface.

The integrated file transfers with our application workflows have certainly sped up our business service delivery by 80%. It has allowed the business to integrate file transfers more readily. Prior to utilizing the Control-M module, people had to write their own file transfer scripts in a scripting language of their choice to vary degrees of effectiveness. With the integrated File Transfer solution within Control-M, there is a standardized way of performing file transfers along with the capability of file watching and grabbing the file names that were transferred, making it much more versatile.

Control-M can immediately report when a job fails. If you have proper monitoring in place, you're notified immediately when your business flows are impacted. In the past, when you run jobs using Cron or just wrote shell scripts, you're really left in the dark because they don't necessarily report even from within Control-M. Implementing Control-M has made the business realize how critical and important it is to have proper error coding within the scripts that they schedule. If the scripts don't necessarily report any errors or redirect the system output into log files, when a job fails, there is no way to detect that.

We've automated many time-consuming business reports and other things that were very manual and took a tremendous amount of manhours. We've also automated a lot of maintenance using Control-M. We've integrated with Ansible Tower. So, we now are able to run Ansible playbooks and Ansible job templates. With the scheduling capability and the multitude of integrations that Control-M offers, it really acts as the unifying glue and as a communicator and orchestrator across the enterprise. With Ansible Tower, you can run a number of playbooks through it to perform patching and reboots and whatever maintenance that the infrastructure teams require, but you can't really do it when the business is still operating, or you can't do it when that business is operating, but you could do it for another business that's not operating at the moment. It is very hard to coordinate that without knowing which lines of business have jobs running or things like that. With Control-M, you can see that and you can actually enact workload policies to put jobs on hold prior to running Ansible playbooks. Once your Ansible playbook is complete, you can release the jobs again by deactivating the workload policies. So, it makes those processes very streamlined.

We do use the Role-Based Administration feature. We have been allowing other groups to gain more control over their agents so that they can define connection profiles, and they can do a little bit more on their side without inundating the main team with a lot of tasks. Everybody is happier. They can get things done faster, and they have immediate feedback and response because they're in control. The main Control-M team is not inundated with a lot of different requests from various teams to do a number of mechanical tasks. They don't get asked to create the connection profile for a database. People have all the information there, and they can do it themselves. They can define it in a way so that only they have access to it.

It has helped us to achieve faster issue resolution. Control-M reports on the error. It is easier to view the system output of that job. Whether it is an Informatica job, a scripted job, or a database job, it is easier to go in and view the issue and then troubleshoot from there. Most of the time, you can be running from the point of failure if the jobs aren't defined correctly. In a properly defined job, I would estimate that there is a 70% to 90% reduction in the meantime to resolution.

It has helped us by improving our service-level operations performance. We've built integration between Control-M and our ITSM, which is ServiceNow, and that has certainly allowed us to gain more visibility within our community through ServiceNow. Every time a production job fails, an incident ticket is cut, and that's highly visible. That needs to be escalated too, and there is a much more defined process to be able to resolve that issue. In the past, obviously, when you didn't have that level of visibility or that integration, there was always time lost in identifying what the issue is.

The File Transfer component is quite valuable. The integration with products such as Informatica and SAP is very valuable to us as well. Rather than having to build our own interface into those products, we can use the ones that come out of the box. The integration with databases is valuable as well. We use database jobs quite a bit. The file watcher component is also indispensable when integrating with other applications that generate files, instead of triggering a workflow based on time.

We have been experimenting with centralized connection profiles. There are some bugs to be worked out. So, we don't feel 100% comfortable with only using centralized connection profiles. We do have a mix of control on agents out there, which leads to some complications because earlier agents do not support centralized connection profiles.

A lot of the areas of improvement revolve around Automation API because that area is constantly evolving. It is constantly changing, and it is constantly being updated. There are some bugs that are introduced from one version to the next. So, the regression testing doesn't seem to capture some of the bugs that have been fixed in prior versions, and those bugs are then reintroduced in later versions. One particular example is that we were trying to use the Automation API to fetch a number of run ads users from the environment. The username had special characters and backspace characters because it was a Windows User ID. In the documentation, there is a documented workaround for that. However, that relied on two particular settings in the Tomcat web server. I later found out that these settings work out-of-the-box for version 9.0.19, but those two options were not included in the config file for 9.0.20. So, it led to a little bit of confusion and a lot of time trying to diagnose, both with support and the BMC community, what is the issue. Ultimately, we did resolve that, but that is time spent that really shouldn't have been spent. It had obviously been working in 9.0.19, and I don't know why that was missed in 9.0.20, but that's a primary example of an improvement that can happen.

We've also noticed that the Control-M agents themselves now run Java components. Over time, they tend to destabilize. It could be because garbage collection isn't happening, or something is not happening. We then realize that the agent is consuming quite a large amount of memory resources on the servers themselves. After recycling the agents and releasing that memory, things go back to normal, but there are times when the agent becomes unresponsive. The jobs get submitted, and nothing executes, but we don't know about it until somebody says, "Hey, but my job isn't running." When we look at it, it says Executing within the GUI, but there is no actual process running on the server. So, there is some disconnect there. There is no alerting function or the agent there that says, "Hey, I'm not responding." It is not showing up in the x alerts or anything like that.

The integrated guides have not been that helpful to us. I do find a lot of the how-to videos on the knowledge portal to be useful. However, there are some videos where the directions don't always match with some of the implementations. There are some typos here and there, but overall, those have been more helpful for us.

Its pricing and licensing could be a little bit better.  The regular Managed File Transfer piece, is a little overpriced, especially for folks who already have licensed Advanced File Transfer.

What I'm also noticing when I'm trying to recruit for Control-M positions is that the talent pool is quite small. There's not a whole lot of companies that utilize Control-M, and if they do, most people don't want to let their Control-M resources go if they're good. There is a high barrier of entry for most people to learn Control-M. There are Workbench, Automation API, and so forth mainly for developers to learn, but there are not a whole lot of resources out there for people to get more familiar with administering Control-M or things like that in terms of the technology or even awareness. So, it becomes very challenging to acquire new resources for that. A lot of the newer people coming out of college don't even know what is Control-M. If they do, they think of it as a batch scheduler, which is certainly not true in its current transformation.

Control-M is a very powerful enterprise tool, but the overall perception has not changed in the past five to six years that I've been working with Control-M. There's not much incentive for people to dive into that world. It is a very small community, and overall, the value of Control-M is not being showcased adequately, maybe at the C-level for corporations. I've had multiple conversations with other people and other companies who have already exit using Control-M. About 70% of the companies out there do not take full advantage of the capabilities in Control-M. So, that type of utilization really hampers and hinders the reputation of Control-M. That's because people then acquire this untrue concept that Control-M can only do X, Y, and Z, rather than the fact that Control-M can do so much more. I don't know if it needs a grassroots marketing movement or a top-down marketing movement, but this is what the perception is because that's what I'm hearing and that's what I'm seeing. For some of the challenges that I face working in Control-M, when I go back to my management and say, "Hey, I want to spend more money in this space," they're like, "Why? Can you justify it? This is what we see Control-M as it is. It's not going to bring us value in this area or that area." I have to go back and develop a new business case to say, "Hey, we need to upgrade to MFT enterprise or something like that." So, it definitely requires a lot more work convincing management in order to get all these components. In the past, we had to justify acquiring a workload change manager. We had to justify acquiring the workload archive. All of these bring benefits not only to our audit environment but also to the development environment, but the fact that we had to fight so hard to acquire these is challenging.

I've been using Control-M for about eight years.

Version 9 was very stable. Once they started adding a lot of the newer Java components, the stability suffered. It seems to have gotten better in version 9.0.20, but that's could be my basic perception. 

We run a lot of database client jobs. There are some things that we've implemented that I understand can contribute to the agent instability. We sometimes extract a lot of database output and massage that output using other scripts. I've noticed there are certain things that you cannot do with it, or there are some things that contribute to the instability. For example, in the output scanning functionality, there certainly is a size limit. You probably don't want to scan anything too large because that's going to put a lot of resources on the environment.

In addition, there are times when the agent becomes unresponsive. The jobs get submitted, but nothing executes. There is no alerting function. These are the examples of instability that I've noticed. Overall, the main application itself, the EM, and the scheduler have been pretty stable.

It is very scalable in terms of job execution. I haven't really explored scaling Control-M and the EM environment to a point where we have hundreds of users accessing it at a given time. That's because I don't have a hundred users who want to access that at a given time, but I do understand that you can distribute the web server more, and then have a load balancer to balance the load. I would think Control-M is a fairly scalable application.

In terms of its users, we have a lot of application support folks. We do have some developers who access Control-M mostly for the non-prod environments to execute and monitor their own jobs. There are some software engineers and operational engineers who are part of the application support teams that access Control-M. As for size or concurrent users, we have about 50 concurrent users at the max.

I would probably give them a nine out of 10. For the most part, they're very helpful, but there's always an initial standard dialogue. For an issue, you have to collect from EM logs, agent logs, and so forth, and you submit that. Sometimes, we have done all the advanced work and submitted it, but they still come back and say, "Hey, we need the logs." It seems like that's a canned response without looking at the tickets.

Positive

We've been with Control-M for quite a long time. We have not been using anything else in my history with this organization. 

I have not looked at anything recently. I am aware there are other application orchestration solutions out there, but I have not felt the need to go explore those options at the time.

If you're deploying using out-of-the-box options, the process is fairly straightforward. If there is some customization that needs to happen, then the process can be complex, and the documentation does not cover some of those complexities.

For the most part, we are standard out of the box. We have run into some performance issues where we had to, later on, go in and maybe make some modifications. For example, we had to stand up different gateways for various purposes just because one singular gateway was not enough to take the load in particular because we had installed a workload archive, and that was just taking up a lot of resources. Other human users were not able to perform their actions because the archive user was consuming so much of the server's resources. So, there was a lot of tweaking there, and we had to basically break out and distribute some of the components.

In terms of implementation strategy or deployment plan for Control-M, the environment always had Control-M, and we just had to upgrade the Control-M environment. We've had Control-M in our environment for quite a long time, probably when it was still version 6. So, as we progressed through different versions, we obviously had to expand the environment and the platforms. We initially started off with Control-M on AIX, and we later moved to Control-M on Linux. As you go to Linux, obviously, there is planning for high availability and production environments, disaster recovery environments, and so forth. So, you have to plan for marrying a lot of the BMC Control-M components and identifying where a load balancer may be required, or DNS ALIAS is required so that you can quickly flip over in the event something happens. Then, of course, there is sizing for the environment in terms of how many jobs are running, how many executions are happening, and so forth. This is how we plan.

We've used the AMIGO program, and then we've performed the upgrades ourselves.

For its day-to-day administration, we have a team of five people. They're administrators and schedulers.

Its return on investment is quite high, and that's mostly because we use so many of Control-M's capabilities. We also extend those capabilities. We write our own scripts to be able to integrate Control-M with so many other applications such as Automation Anywhere, Alteryx. We have also done vice versa. We have helped other teams develop their capabilities in integrating with the REST API and Control-M. So, the ROI is quite high for our use case, but based on the conversation with some of the community partners out there, their ROI is probably quite low because they're not making use of all these new features. I don't know if it is because they don't have the skillset to make use of these new features, or their management structure or process structure is hampering them from going out there. A lot of large companies I know like to maintain the status quo, and that's why they're slow to adapt and slow to move, which is going to hurt them in the long run, but in the meantime, it can hurt the adoption of Control-M as well.

Its pricing and licensing could be a little bit better. Based on my experience and discussions with other existing customers, everybody feels that the regular Managed File Transfer piece, not the enterprise one, is a little overpriced, especially for folks who already have licensed Advanced File Transfer. We understand that Advanced File Transfer is going away and is going to be the end of life, and there is some additional functionality built into MFT, but the additional functionality does not really correlate with the huge price increase over what we're paying for AFT already. This has actually driven a lot of people to look for alternative solutions.

I know they are now moving more towards endpoint licensing or task-based licensing. In my eyes, the value of Control-M is the ability to break down jobs from monolithic scripts. You don't want to have to wrap everything up in one monolithic script and say, "Hey, I'm executing one task because I want to save money." That defeats the purpose of controlling, and that defeats the value of Control-M. By being able to take that monolithic script and break it down into the 10 most basic components, you can monitor each step. It is self-documenting because, within Control-M, you can see how the flow will work, and you can recover from any one of those 10 steps rather than having to rerun the monolithic script should something fail. That being said, the endpoint licensing does make more sense, but maybe pricing or things like that can be more forgiving.

N/A

It is worth the time and money investment to learn more about Control-M. You should learn all the features of Control-M and really explore and test out the capabilities of Control-M. That's the only way people get comfortable with what Control-M can implement. A lot of people aren't aware of just how flexible a platform Control-M is, especially with all the new features that are being added via the Automation API. These features are helping to drive Control-M and things developed in Control-M more towards a microservices model.

We are just beginning to explore using Control-M as part of our DevOps automation toolchains and leverage its “as-code” interfaces for developers. Obviously, there is a little bit of a learning curve for developers as well in order to see the value of developing Jobs-as-Code. Currently, we're walking developers through it, and we're holding their hands a little bit in terms of developing Jobs-as-Code, but we are heading in that direction because it does provide artifacts that you can version control and change quickly and easily. You can redeploy much quicker than just having the jobs defined in the graphical user interface. Previously, when you had to modify it, you either did it via the GUI, or you exported it via XML and then modified those components. Once you get the developers closer to their job flows, then you can theoretically speed up the delivery of applications along with scheduled jobs.

I don't have a whole lot of experience with other scheduling orchestration environments, but from everything that I've heard while speaking with other colleagues, I would say Control-M ranks fairly high. I would rate it a nine out of 10. Control-M usually is the platform that people are moving to, not moving away from.

Our use case was mainly about consolidating our data pipeline from different sources and doing some data transformations and changes. We needed to get data from different sources into a state where we could act on it into one consolidated data set.

It gave us the ability to consolidate a diverse set of solutions into one comprehensive solution that streamlined our development processes. It was straightforward to adopt and we could build on existing skills without having to have 10 solutions for 10 problems.

And when it came to creating actionable data, it gave us the ability to move faster and at scale. By adopting a solution like Control-M, we were able to scale and deliver faster data transformations and maneuvers, turning data into insights in a more efficient and scalable way.

The ability to deliver faster and at scale was important. Business and management always wanted us to deliver faster and bigger and we were able to do both with the solution that we implemented using Control-M. We were able to respond faster to changes and business needs, at scale. 

Having a feature-rich solution enabled us to aggregate all of our processes into it, and that made the overall execution, from a project and portfolio perspective, a lot more efficient.

We were also able to respond to audit requests, because it's centralized, in a much more efficient way.

There isn't a single feature that is most valuable, but if I had to choose one, it would be the rich ability it gave us for making customized scripts. That was probably the most unique feature set for our situation. We used Control-M's Python Client and cloud data service integrations with AWS and, as a feature, it was very customizable. It gave us a lot of flexibility for customizing whatever data maneuver we wanted to do within a pipeline.

The Python Client and cloud data service integrations have a rich set of features with flexibility. It did not require additional, crazy skills or experience to deal with it. It was a nice transition into enabling a data scientist to leverage existing skills to build those pipelines.

Creating, integrating, and automating data pipelines with Control-M was straightforward. It did require some knowledge and training, but compared to other solutions, it was a lot simpler. Working with data workflows, with the data-coding language integrated into Control-M, was straightforward. The level of difficulty was somewhere between "medium" and "easy." It was not that hard to leverage existing skills and knowledge within this specific feature.

The user interface for creating, monitoring, and ensuring delivery of files as part of the data pipeline was very actionable. It was almost self-explanatory. Somebody with basic user-interface experience could navigate the calls to action and the configuration that is required. It was well-designed.

I would like to see them adopt more cloud. Most companies don't have a single cloud, meaning we have data sources that come from different cloud providers. That may have been solved already, but supporting Azure would be an improvement because companies tend not to have only AWS and GCP.

I used it for a couple of years.

It's fairly stable. I don't recall any specific issues. 

It's fairly scalable. For our needs, it scaled very nicely.

We have a shared model where we have a centralized, shared service organization when it comes to data. Different people will use it, but it's centralized.

We used other solutions from BMC as well, and their customer support was always great. I give them a 10 out of 10.

Training or a Knowledge Base were available or you could ask a question by submitting a ticket.

Positive

We had DataStage from IBM and SSIS.

The switch was really about streamlining the process. We had other tools that only did partial processes or were not doing it with the speed and efficiency that we were looking for. We were looking for a solution that could streamline things and solve 90 percent of our data challenges.

The analysis that I saw validated that the ROI was within a couple of years.

The pricing was competitive, from what I understand.

We looked at continuing to use the same solutions we had been using, and there were a couple of other cloud-based solutions that we evaluated. One of them was Matillion. The ease of use was one component of our decision, as was the flexibility of scripting with Python. Those were the key differentiators.

For the on-prem solution, we had to do the patching and whatever was required by the vendor, but the cloud implementation was a model that was usable. The upgrades, changes, and patching are done directly by the vendor.

Control-M was a critical piece of the puzzle, to help us with all the data transformation and projects that we had to do. It was part of either one specific project or even a larger project that required that middle data transformation so that we could get to analytics or any other consumption of that data.