IBM Workload Automation Reviews

The whole product is valuable because it is a tool for batch automation.

There should be more custom documentation, specifically around Java APIs. There should also be more training.

In terms of features, we are currently using only 50% of its features. We don't use all features that are available, but there is always room for improvement in all of the tools. 

I have been using this solution for 15 years.

It is very stable.

It is extremely scalable. We run more than 80,000 jobs a day across multiple platforms.

Their technical support is fine. We have a contract with them to assist us.

It is simple to install.

It is about one-third of the cost of a controller.

I would rate IBM Workload Automation a seven out of ten.

We use it at the Bank for the portfolio management system. In 2001 and 2003 I created all these jobs for the portfolio management system for collecting data from the backend system.

From 2015 I use it as the tool that collects the resources within the IT system that reports the use of different resources, file system resources, storage resources, and so on.

The most important feature is the creation of folders. It's a really great feature because you can organize the process with naming conventions. 

Other solutions like Control-M are better than this solution. IBM should have better integration with the cloud. 

It should support other schedulers that aren't IBM products. 

We have been using IBM Workload Automation since 2015. 

It's very, very stable. The support is quite good. I was totally astonished about the life cycle of this IBM product because a lot of colleagues told me that Control-M is the best scheduler but I have found that it's not true. IBM does a really good job with its product.

It's better than the solution that Control-M offers. Within Deutsche bank they are using Control-M for the investment banking and they are using different timezones, for every console you need a separate installation with Control-M. With IBM, it's not necessary. 

IBM uses also has different plan options, from monthly plans to weekly plans. This is a problem with Control-M. It makes maintenance very, very costly because you have to configure different environments for different timezones.

The scheduler is a little bit complex. They have different concepts, they use event mechanisms for their workforce. 

With Control-M you have a lot of server components. In the meantime, you can install them with Kubernetes as well which is a big improvement.

I would definitely recommend this product. It's an interesting option in terms of schedulers. 

I would rate it an eight out of ten.

The tool is managed from offshore by another company. The primary use for it in our company providing support to our main client who is a large beverage company that needs the product to manage operations. I just act as the support interface between the client and the offshore team starting at the time I took this position as a global manager for workload scaling. I found out about this product someplace and how we could put it to use. We have been running it ourselves and with our client for a long time. It is also a part of our company's application or solution set.  

The use cases for my workload purposes have to do with my applications. It works fine for scaling jobs and can interface with other systems. So it does what I need it to do.  

The interface for the applications team is really the most valuable part of the product in my opinion.  

The interface for the operator is not so good. I do not think it is as complete as something like Control-M by BMC Software (named for former Shell executives Scott Boulette, John J. Moores, and Dan Cloer). A few other things could be better like the scheduler and linking between jobs and dependencies.  

I have been working for the last five years between the client the provider and my company. 

This product is quite stable. There are no issues within the application or with the tool itself becoming unstable.  

The scalability is actually quite fine. I think that right now we have around 100 to 150 users that have jobs running on it.  

The offshore team is made up of about five guys that mainly take care of the maintenance tasks. At this moment, we do not actually have any plans to scale our usage. Maybe in the coming two years, we might have to. We are planning to upgrade or migrate to another tool depending on what is best for our situation at that time.  

I think the technical support is great. They have been helpful when we needed something resolved.  

Before working with IBM Tivoli Workload Automation I worked with Control-M from BMC. 

The main differences and advantages of Control-M are mostly to do with the operator interface. The console that the operator is using is quite a bit better in Control-M rather than Tivoli, and so is the way to schedule and make the relationships between jobs.  

I think the product is generally easy-to-use and that includes my experience with the setup.  

The advice I would give to others considering using Workload Automation depends on the necessity and the reality of their requirements. It depends on the complexity of the jobs. Depending on that it may be interesting to use Tivoli because it is a good tool. It is a good application to use to run workload tracking.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate this product between and eight and ten depending on who is using it and for what reason. I think it is quite good so I think it deserves a nine.  

Additional features I would like to see included in the next release to improve and make it a ten would just be the two things I mentioned that Control-M does somewhat better for now. The interface for the operator should be improved, and the way to create relationships and dependency between the jobs can be better.  

The most valuable feature is the job scheduler.

I would like to be able to access the return value or result from one job, in the following job. This is a feature that other solutions have and is very helpful. I had to create my own workaround for it because the capability is important for me.

It would be helpful to have a mobile app that could be used to follow the job schedule. Most IT applications now have mobile app support.

I worked on IBM Workload Automation for close to 10 years, although I have recently changed companies and no longer use it.

The stability is good. 

We did not need to scale this solution. We had close to ten people who used it.

Technical support from IBM is very good. I have worked with different vendors and I know that it is sometimes difficult to get a good level of support, but there were people supporting this solution who were very good and always helped.

The implementation was done by external consultants.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Product administration with minimal scheduling usage these days. Installing, configuring, and administering distributed agents and integration with multiple services and applications.

Provides a robust, full spectrum enterprise-wide WLA platform. I have practical experience with all of the major "Enterprise" WLA products (Control-M, CA-7, and Zeke). None of them have the functionality and ease of use of TWS.

The DWC, when configured correctly, is a great GUI tool to provide Self-Service Scheduling capabilities to the user community. The variety of agents available allows for an extremely flexible Enterprise WLA solution. The WAPL (formerly SOE) functionality is one of the major things that sets IWA apart from the other platforms. With its use, you can automate tasks that other platforms can only dream about.

This may not be the norm, but slow down on the releases a bit. I fully understand that IWA functionality is increasing at an amazing rate, but trying to keep up with the upgrades is rough. Figure out a way to speed up the DWC response a little.

None! It's indestructible, and if configured correctly, and easily recovered in a disaster scenario.

None! I have supported this product in literally 100s of different environments and its unmatched in its ability to scale to any size.

Let us be honest: It is IBM. They may not have invented arrogant, but they perfected it. 

If you make it clear that you know what you are doing and you get support involved, it is as good as it gets. I have been given direct cell phone contacts to Product Development in Rome (when it was still there). They cared enough to help at that level.

I am currently supporting both IWA and CA-7 while my company decides on which direction to go forward.

With any experience whatsoever, IWA is as simple to install and configure. You basically fill in some blanks and run the setup jobs. They create all of the STC, panels and skeletons that you require.

In-house.

If you are running an IBM Mainframe, why would you want any other product as your z/OS based WLA "hub" ? 

To my knowledge, IWA is the only WLA product that will provide "parallel tracking" capability to assist in upgrading from one platform to IWA.

Not applicable. I have used IWA, CA-7, Control-M, and Zeke in the past.

Having used all of the major WLA platforms, I believe:

1. IWA is the most user-friendly and feature-packed product on the market today. 
2. Control-M is a close second (even though there are rumors that BMC is shopping it around). 
3. As for CA, at this point it's hard to tell what CA's Strategic Vision is going forward. They have ESP, Dseries, and now Automic, yet they are keeping the old dinosaur CA-7 alive because they can't figure out how to get all of the old legacy clients off it without major heartburn.

The event notification feature is beneficial since it allows for prompt and immediate notification in relation to any errors occurring in the system.

The IBM scheduler allows for easy and seamless execution of the automated tasks in order to ensure data processing.

The integration and monitoring within the extended agents such as SAP, PeopleSoft mainframe etc needs to be improved.

Extended agents such as SAP, PeopleSoft, CA-7, etc do not have the ability to trace child jobs or dependencies within the extended tools. The ability to do so would be a great added-feature in the next iteration of the application.

I have used this solution for five years.

8.5.1 is not stable, we've since moved to 8.6 but the front-end GUI was very slow. We've since migrated to a 8.6 back-end with a 9.1 front-end.

The system is remarkably stable on Unix/Linux/extended agents. There were some connection/configuration issues on the Windows machines.

IBM TDWC makes scalability and functionality easy and fast.

One drawback would be the mail server IDs are maxed out at 6-7 servers per ID (IDs are classified as per the alpha-numeric characters A-Z and 0-9).

IBM customer service is great. Dedicated account managers make support and technical assistance very easy.

The PRBs with IBM make support and troubleshooting easy and efficient.

We have not used any other solution. Although, we've upgraded 3 times.

The application comes packaged from IBM. Once your Oracle db (or DB2 db) and network connections are configured, you are essentially set and running.

Research your needs versus the cost and scalability of the product.

We looked at other solutions namely Skybot by HelpSystems, Tidal by Cisco, CA-7 from Computer Associates and Control-M by BMC.

Research your needs versus the cost and scalability of the product

• Alerting on ABENDS: When a job abnormally ends (ABENDS), the solution notifies us when the job did not complete successfully. This is a nice feature for job streams that require successful completion of one job before it moves on to another. It’s still “reactionary” in nature, but allows us to run a job stream again. This occurs, in some cases, before the end users of our data services know there’s a problem.
• When changing a cycling ID, we only have to change it once.

• Moving jobs from Dev to Prod only takes a text file script, which is straightforward.

It has over complicated things.

• It is complex to use
• Lacks scalability
• It is difficult to set up jobs to run
• We need to be able to elevate privileges like Task Scheduler

With Windows Server 2012, there is a setting for User Access Control. UAC is a security feature that prompts the user, and even administrators, when running a job that requires a higher elevation because of its interaction with the Operating System.

When you’re trying to automate tasks and run them in the background, this prompt still comes up and asks if it’s OK to raise the privilege level. That hangs the job.

When running the solution, there’s no way to get around that prompt. Any job that requires that elevated privilege sits and waits for the user to answer it.

With Windows Task Scheduler, there is a check box in the Scheduled Task that says “Run with Highest Privilege”. If that’s checked, then it automatically bypasses the UAC prompt, and completes successfully.

The only other way to get around that is to lower the UAC restriction on the server, making it more vulnerable to malicious code.

I have been using this solution since November, 2010.

We have not have issues with stability.

We had to write a scripted solution to be able to change jobs behind the scenes. The solution runs with a specific command fed into it. We fed it this script: “CSCRIPT

Our company has our own internal support.

We used Windows Task Scheduler. We switched because the new SSIS servers were going to be managed servers.

The setup was very complex. Our environment is very large. Setting up Workload Automation on our set of servers required the following:

• Setting up the agent
• Setting up the notification lists
• Filling out various forms for job stream scheduling. (It just goes on from there.)

This was the new corporate standard and we were not given a choice.

Look into ALL options. Verify that you can run your application servers with UAC turned to "do not prompt when using an admin account".

Dynamic scheduling: This is one feature which helped us achieve some important business objectives without the need to install TWS on a server. Some of the servers in our organization have restricted access and dynamic scheduling helped us schedule jobs on these servers without the need to install TWS.

• Monitoring
• Reporting

TWS doesn’t have in-built monitors to capture and report READY/INTRO state jobs. In our environment, we use TWS to schedule jobs in SAP and without an in-built monitor to capture these, we use custom-built scripts to report jobs stuck in READY/INTRO state.

I have used the product for seven years.

There were real stability issues. The WebSphere process gets hung on TWS masters running TWS 9.1. WebSphere is used heavily in our environment and a restart of WAS is really required at least once in a month.

There were no scalability issues.

Technical support was not always the best. You need a little bit of patience until the PMR is routed to the right layer of support.

Initial setup using the GUI was straightforward. However installing/upgrading a TWS master using the silent approach is a little bit tricky, as the details and the steps have to be collected from many other documents. There was no single document to help us to install the TWS, WAS, and IBM Installation Manager using the silent approach.

I would recommend other users to definitely consider TWS, as it has proven to be a powerful tool in our environment so far.

The API is a valuable feature as it allowed us to integrate the inventory, change and ticketing systems to fully automate most of the monitoring processes for new devices, decommissioned devices and during approved changes.

The new servers automatically get monitored with the alerts going to the server administrator or application developers, without the need for someone to submit a request.

The alerts automatically go to a command center, when a server is classified as production in the inventory system. The alerts get automatically suppressed during an approved change.

A lot of the automation that we added to the product should come built into it, so that every customer doesn't have to reinvent the wheel. This will eliminate the need for us to modify our code, in order to make it compatible with each future release.

Below are examples of automation that we developed which should be built into the product:

• Integration with the inventory system, so that alerts go to the proper teams. For example, alerts for servers classified as development would go to the apps support team or alerts for servers classified as production would go to the monitoring center. Also, alerts would stop when a server is marked as decommissioned.

• Integration with the change management system so that alerts would be suppressed during the change window for approved changes. Thus, alerts would begin for approved changes adding new servers.

I have used this solution for five years.

There were some stability issues but we lit a fire under IBM's feet and they corrected them.

There were no scalability issues; we managed to deploy over 85,000 server with no issues.

The level of technical support is top notch. If the support team can't fix an issue, they don't hesitate to engage the product development team.

Initially, we were using a home-grown product that didn't scale as well and had no ability for cross-product automation.

The setup was very complex and required on-site support, mostly due to the cross-product automation that we implemented.

Talk to your IBM sales representative to see what they can offer you.

We did not evaluate other solutions.

Talk to other customers using this product, who are similar in size and configuration, so as to get feedback, ideas and what to watch out for.

The simplicity of the GUI is the most valuable feature for us.

My organization has automated a lot of tasks that were previously being done manually like processing of cheques from multiple banks. This was a three step process wherein a dedicated man resource used to scan the cheques individually, another person then updated a record in the database followed by sending out an email.

All these steps required a lot of time and money and any absence of human resources would result in severe lapses. With the help of Tivoli, all the three tasks were automated into a single jobstream that runs throughout the year without any manual intervention, even taking off days and holidays.

Out of the box reporting and provision for customization/integration with other products are the areas where this product can be improved.

I have been using the product for six years.

We have not encountered any significant stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

The support teams at IBM that work with Tivoli Workload Scheduler cases are comprised of people who have tremendous command on troubleshooting issues as well as people who are not that technically capable. So the experience can be good and bad depending on the engineer that you end up coordinating with. I would say overall, the support for this product is above average.

I have been consistently using Tivoli Workload Scheduler as a one stop solution for my various client's job scheduling and automation needs, so I am not aware of any previous solutions.

The initial setup is not very easy as IBM has multiple components integrated with the core product which are mandatory to setup and can be a bit tricky.

This would be one the expensive lines of product in IBM's portfolio, so initial costs can run high if someone is buying it for the first time. The licensing is IBM proprietary, and clients are not charged on the basis of underlying hardware configuration that hosts the installed application - CPU cores and manufacturer to be exact - which goes up as you add on to your processing capabilities.

Over a period, once you are a client, you may get better pricing quotes from your sales representative. Also, there are workload based flexible pricing options available for smaller setups which can always be considered and negotiated accordingly.

The alternatives in this category of products are not many. BMC Control-M and CA Autosys and another job scheduler from Tidal are the major ones. I have evaluated BMC and CA, both are equally capable and perform wonderfully well, the one advantage IBM has over its counterparts is its capabilities with mainframe scheduling for a very long time. Most old companies have had mainframes for 2-3 decades now and IBM integrates seamlessly across their legacy mainframe as well as the newer distributed setups.

It's a very good scheduling product if you have a combination of mainframe and distributed environments that have batch operations and repetitive tasks running on them. The SAP plugin is outstanding and SAP process chains run a like a dream when scheduled using Tivoli.

If you have an environment like the one I've just mentioned, this would unarguably be your best bet. The initial costs are steep but it pays off in the longer run as the product itself is very stable if configured correctly.