Tidal by Redwood Reviews

In our organization, we are running scheduled jobs or self-triggered jobs in batches iteratively. We have been using Tidal for all the primary purposes of development, testing, and production. Tidal has provided flexibility to run jobs in all these environments.

In the production environment, we perform systems administration and the development of the Job scheduling environment. I configure Tidal, maintain it, deploy it, apply hotfixes, or perform any type of system admin function.

In terms of deployment, we're on-premise. 

As per my experience in automation and job scheduling Tidal software is the easiest scheduler to use for creating schedules, jobs, and events. As it is Windows-based, most features are predefined and easy to apply and fix.

As far as the alerts are considered, if something breaks, after the threshold analysis, everybody would know about it, and then troubleshooting action can be taken. Ops Teams tasks have been simplified.

We have used Tidal Workload Automation to configure, communicate and integrate with a lot of different software and tools. We have used SQL Databases, AWS, Azure, and others. We haven't faced any config issues. Everything has been great.

Tidal Workload Automation UI is very interactive and great. It's easy to use and easy to administer, and it's very flexible. Tidal had always brought us good luck. 

We can run a lot of variety of types of scripts on a lot of different types of platforms and servers. It Interacts and communicates with all of them.

The availability of the job dependency feature has set up all the jobs to run in a dependent order rather than in just chronological order.

Tidal Vendor support is the best technical support team we've had to work with. Among various other software, they're the ones our team prefers to work with.

The alerting configurations can be enhanced and enabled according to the requirements. The threshold value differences can be implemented so that the monitor/viewers can get to know the difference in the value readings and can enhance accordingly to troubleshoot according to alerts. 

The job failure alerts can be updated with more details for better troubleshooting.

They can do better daily/weekly reporting in terms of production statistics reporting dashboard and generic variables in respective platforms.

I have been using the solution for two years at my organization.

Our largest use cases are for the execution of SAP and JD Edwards jobs. Then, there are a lot of other technologies, however, in terms of the Pareto principle, really that's the bulk of our processing. SAP is what we use for our manufacturing and operational type stuff with the actual products. JD Edwards is a lot more of financial reporting and projections and things like that.

We use the solution to run SAP and JD Edwards. Windows and Unix hosts are probably the second most common use case, as well as web services. Any REST API would apply - and we use a lot of REST API technology. Protocol, really.

Primarily the biggest thing is giving visibility to what, in a lot of places I've worked in, are transparent, like invisible processes. You have this massive batch and, unless you have someone watching that and you have a place to have a single point of truth and say this is successful or not, it makes it very hard to trace things. With Tidal, you can say, "Hey, this is the objective notifications," and all the ones you explicitly want are checkboxes. It's easy to add those things in.

Having a single pane of glass, regardless of which technology we're talking about has been great. A lot of time, I'm in middleware, so what will happen is people will want to say, "Oh, it's this part or that part or the other part." You can see all of them side by side in Tidal.

It talks both to web stuff, which is helpful. Everything you want to talk to is there. If you have stuff that's still more 20th century and you want to run it at a command line, you have that available to you as well.

We use the solution for cross-platform, cross-application workloads. That's the biggest use for us and that's the biggest advantage.

Our impression of the solution's ability to manage and monitor workloads has been good. It does what it's prescribed to do.

The solution enables admins and users to see the information relevant to them. One of the other features that we use a lot is really a part of web services. We talk to ServiceNow. We have specific metrics to go with failures for major incidents and things like that.

The solution’s drill-down functionality so that admins can investigate data or processes has been super useful. It allows you to instrument for teams at their skill level. As an admin, I can say, I don't let you see these certain elements as you don't use the other ones and that simplifies how those technologies work. You don't have to have everyone see everything. That part's really helpful.

The solution has increased capacity in terms of the number of jobs and integrations. For example, in one of the things that we run, we actually had to expand how big the queue was as they wanted to run 300 parallel jobs. Historically, we hadn't run three parallel jobs for the whole company. So the scaling of that was just 15 minutes. Then, boom, everything was ready to go. It scaled pretty easily for us.

The teams that are smart about the Tidal usage, that basically will get it to the point of human intervention, save a lot of hours, especially when it comes to log gathering. That kind of stuff now is automatic for them. That saves a lot of hours.

Honestly, the biggest problem we have with it is people's interpretation of the results. It gives you really good information and people sometimes are just not really good at working with that information.

The GUI, the graphical user interface, gets a little bit busy. You have these flyouts that sometimes are a little tedious to get through. They need to look at just ways to simplify the graphical user interface a little bit. That would be good.

I've used the solution since 2009. That's 13 or 14 years.

The stability is very good. Almost every time where we've had an outage, it had not been due to the software, rather, it was some element of our infrastructure failing. The most common failure for us is we lose connectivity between the database and the application. There's not an app alive that's not going to have some problems when you can't connect like that.

We split users primarily into four roles. The viewers can't do anything other than see what's happened. There are also operators, which are people that can rerun jobs, yet can't modify anything. They're a little bit ahead of a viewer. Then you go into being a developer, which can write jobs in non-production. Finally, my admin team uses it. They keep it all running. The fattest part of the bell curve, the biggest user there is, is the developers. Overall, we're between 1200 and 1500 users. The admin team is six people, and the developers are about 800 of them.

We're worldwide. Unless we get some off-world friends to introduce themselves, I don't have a lot more room for expansion. What we're seeing now is people wanting to stand up more masters for more autonomy. I see us expanding into China, which is going to be a pretty nifty little trick since there are a lot of restrictions on communications there. That's about the only expansion I see for us. Obviously, there is increased job usage. However, in terms of expanding the footprint of the platform, that's only in geographic regions.

Technical support is better than average. It's not stellar yet. They're still working out some kinks. They've got it a lot smoother. I've had predominantly good experiences, just not perfect ones.

Positive

We used AutoSys before. I'm familiar with that tool as well. The big factor in switching was the license model being just a lot more predictable. Then, as a result of that, it was for the number of features that Tidal had. It was significantly more powerful at a lower cost. It wasn't just the cheapest. They were pretty close in cost when we got it all down to it. It was still less expensive, however, also had the more advanced features, in particular REST API, which was super duper expensive with AutoSys. It was a license model that made it very hard to predict the growing cost, versus Tidal. With Tidal, at least in the model that we had, it was very, very stable. We just renewed for another couple of years recently.

The initial setup was straightforward. You essentially need two servers and a database. At its heart, it is pretty simple to set up.

The deployment took three weeks. We deployed in three separate geographic regions. We just did one per week and then gave people time to get comfortable with new steps. We just did it in sequence. We installed, for example, for Japan, then for the United States, and then for Europe.

Learning it is pretty easy. It is a narrow learning curve for operators, for people that are just going to run and monitor. It's a little steeper of a learning curve for an admin to instrument new user groups.

Depending on how fast they read, new users can get up to speed in between one and two hours. We have a one-hour interactive training platform called EdCast. They do a one-hour EdCast that says how it works and then there are two other documents they read that specify and call out how their specific technologies work.

We did use a third party for deployment assistance. Our experience was very good. They are very knowledgeable about the product. They were a good partner. They helped us sort out the boundaries between when there's an error and when you've misconfigured it, and it's just telling you about it. They were very good in that regard.

We have seen ROI in the sense that it's primarily about our ability to stay flat in cost while constantly increasing our volume. That's the biggest ROI that I see.

For me, the key aspect was the linear predictability of costs. I know what handles I have to do, what things cost what. When we renewed having a regular cycle of renewal and re-evaluation kept us on track. For the years that we've been using it, we've had an increase in growth, yet we haven't had exponential increases in cost, which is really good.

Just say from 2009, when we started with it, up to now, we've gone from 5,000 jobs to fivefold. We're at 25,000, 30,000 jobs. However, it wasn't like my costs went up fivefold or tenfold. That was really good for us. That was really important.

The total cost of ownership, given its capacity for jobs and our ability to control infrastructure costs, have been very good. Having stood it up in AWS and having a group that's very active and having those sizings be very easy, what I'm finding is that the hardware requirements and thus the cost stays pretty low for the amount of stuff we're doing, and Tidal seems to respond well to our ability at the AWS layer to change that hardware without really having too many problems.

We are a customer and end-user.

I don’t know if the solution helped reduce or eliminate weekend or overtime hours as that doesn’t really apply to me. We're 24/7. There's no such thing as a weekend for us.

I'd advise new users to not underestimate the way that people will want to blame a tool for something they don't understand. Tidal will display errors from other systems and you need to be prepared for separating a Tidal error from Tidal reporting an error. That's the biggest learning point that you want to have in your head at the beginning.

It's a good idea to define the lanes of responsibility. That's been almost the entirety of my career, maintaining the lanes of responsibility through Tidal, as it's cross-platform, it's cross-technology, it's cross-team. You really have to be able to sort out the difference between a psychology versus a technology problem. It's the way someone feels about what's on their screen. It's been very helpful for that, however, it's probably a similar problem for anything like this. Tidal just makes it so easy to see those things yet oftentimes it gets blamed for stuff.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

Tidal Automation is a better tool than Redwood for enterprise-level applications. It is a stable tool and easier to integrate with any product.

We have a lot of custom-made applications within and outside our company. The product helps us connect with all of the applications in a better way than Redwood. It has in-built plugins enabling easy synchronization.

Tidal Automation’s most valuable feature is customization. It can work and connect with any app.

The product’s UI is outdated. They should work on this particular area. There could be better accessibility for the iPhone and other software similar to Redwood.

We have been using Tidal Automation for five or six years.

I rate the product’s stability a seven out of ten.

We have to make minimal efforts to scale Tidal Automation. Its scalability is an eight or nine out of ten.

The technical support services are good, but they should respond faster.

Neutral

The initial setup process is straightforward. 

The product generates a return on investment.

The price is reasonable in terms of the product’s functionality.

I rate Tidal Automation an eight out of ten. It is a very good container if you are looking for a single enterprise-level scheduler to control the entire operation.

Our business frequently handles large volumes of financial transactions that must be handled accurately and quickly. Automating financial procedures like billing, invoicing, and payment processing with Tidal Automation can help cut down on errors and enhance productivity.

Additionally, Tidal Automation aids us in automating IT operations chores like software updates, server upkeep, and security patching. This can decrease downtime, boost system dependability, and enhance IT efficiency as a whole.

By automating tasks and facilitating the quick implementation of new processes, Tidal Automation is assisting our organization in adapting to changing market conditions, customer requirements, and other factors.

By lowering the possibility of errors and the costs that go along with them, this product can produce outcomes that are more accurate and consistent.

It enables us to concentrate on tasks that are more valuable, like procedure improvements, innovation, and customer service. As a result, workers may be more productive because they can accomplish greater tasks in quicker amounts of time.

Tidal Automation has personalized showcases that provide real-time insights into job execution, resource utilization, and other metrics. This feature can help users monitor and optimize their operations more effectively.

Additionally, it provides compliance and audibility features that let us keep track of and manage all actions done, as well as monitor and restrict access to private data. This might improve data protection and ensure that all legal criteria are met.

The best feature is that it allows task scheduling based on particular occurrences, like the receipt of files, database updates, or system notifications. This can ensure tasks are finished as required and in reaction to particular circumstances.

To better fit their unique needs, the solution should give more customization options. More options for personalization could make it simpler for users to modify the service to fit their particular processes and increase overall efficacy.

It should be capable of handling even more work and more difficult processes, which is beneficial in big organizations.

Overall, Tidal Automation is a strong tool for automating processes. However, there are ways to make the service better in areas like the ones on the list above.

I've been using the Tidal Automation tool for five months now, and it's been a fantastic tool for automating our work tasks and allowing us to complete more tasks in less time. It increases productivity and reduces the need for manual intervention.

We use it in our production environment. We use it to schedule and execute many jobs. It is used by multiple application teams within our organization, such as SQL, Unix, ETL platform, MFT, and our AWS team. Other application teams include front office, back office, and accounting. They all use the Tidal environment.

We use Tidal to connect to other resources and systems through many of its adapters, such as for S3, ServiceNow, and PeopleSoft. We use it to trigger jobs in those applications. The REST API is very easy. Our application users use it to create, rerun, or cancel their jobs. And if they want to update something in the database, they do it with the REST API. It's a good feature.

That direct integration to our applications means we don't need to do other integrations from other applications or create scripts for these integrations. The multiple adapters available for connecting to other software make it easy for users to use the solution.

With other tools, you do not have the ability to schedule jobs on their own. You need to create a group and then assign everything to that group. Only then will the job be able to execute. In Tidal, you can schedule a single job and there is no need to create a group. That's what I like the most.

There are other helpful features as well, like SLA monitoring and the data book so you don't need to maintain other documents.

We also use the Graphical Views feature because our end-users want to see how their jobs are being executed and to monitor flows. They want to see how a job flow is going or where it stopped.

The drill-down into details using the Graphical Views feature is a bit difficult and not that helpful. If you want to go into the details, you have to go to the Job Activity. Graphical Views is not that easy for getting that kind of information.

Also, the user interface could be much better. It's an old-looking UI. Tidal could be much more user-friendly and attractive. I think they are working on that.

Another change I would like to see is that when we face issues or bugs in Tidal, we don't get to the root cause. We are told by Tidal, "Just apply this fix pack and it will resolve the issue." But we need to know the root cause. What has caused that issue? That scenario can be improved and Tidal has to work on it. They should provide us with some root cause analysis about every issue because we have to provide the root cause to our organization. Without the root cause, it is difficult for us to identify the problem.

I started working with Tidal, as an administrator, in April, so I have been using it for six to seven months.

In our non-product environment, it is not as stable for us as it is in our production environment. I'm not sure why it is like that.

It is scalable. It has many features that other tools do not provide. It is very convenient to use and we can scale it up.

Tidal has been widely promoted in our company and we are getting multiple requests to onboard teams into Tidal. They are exploring it and giving us feedback. We pass the feedback to Tidal and then they provide us with enhancements. Our job counts are increasing, day by day.

We have 500 to 600 people using Tidal in our environment.

Technical support is good except for the root-cause issue I mentioned. But they are always willing to help. When we ask them to join a bridge, they usually join it and they try to support us. They have good product knowledge and help us troubleshoot things on the calls.

Neutral

We have two deployment models, making it a hybrid, because we have Tidal on-prem and Tidal for cloud as well. They are two different tools, but they are linked to each other. The cloud environment is based in different regions including US East and US West. We have Tidal in both.

The deployment was straightforward. It was not that difficult because we installed it in a Windows environment. It took three to four months because there was a process we needed to follow. We had a team of eight people involved.

There is some maintenance needed. Sometimes, we face issues with the Client Managers, which is the UI console for Tidal. We need to clear the cache monthly so that we do not face issues.

Our organization has been using Tidal for the past 10 to 15 years. That means it's a valuable tool.

It's cost-effective because it is available at a low cost. That saves us a lot of money compared to other tools.

I have worked with IBM Tivoli Workload Scheduler previously and Tidal has many more features. Tidal is a low-cost tool and not expensive in comparison to other tools.

The ease of use of Tidal for automating is moderate, if you have the proper knowledge and training on how to schedule a job. A new person will need some training on how to get a job scheduled in Tidal.

They have multiple new features coming up in the future. They are going to come up with repositories, for example. If you are going to use Tidal, I would recommend going through their documentation in-depth and only then start using it, so that you are aware of everything. When I joined, I was not experienced with Tidal, so I had to go through the documentation, and then I started working with our live production.

Tidal Automation can handle batch processing task scheduling and implementation, decreasing errors and increasing productivity. 

Data handling and administration duties such as data merging, migration, and transformation can be automated using the program. It can also automate duties related to IT operations, such as software deployment, server upkeep, and backup and recovery. 

By automating procedures for data retention, audit records, and security controls, the software can help guarantee legal conformance. 

It can be used in a variety of sectors to help companies automate processes, increase efficiency, and reduce errors.

Tidal Automation automates time-consuming and repetitive chores, decreasing employee workload and increase productivity. 

It can also reduce error risk, enhance data and process quality and precision, and provide real-time tracking and alerting. 

It is intended to enable large-scale automation environments, making it appropriate for companies with complicated processes and big data volumes. 

Tidal Automation also offers sophisticated security features and compliance controls to guarantee the security of confidential data and processes. 

It can assist companies in streamlining processes, improving efficiency, reducing errors, and saving money, making it a useful instrument for groups of all sizes.

Tidal Automation automates time-consuming and repetitive chores, reducing employee workload and increase productivity. 

It can also reduce error risk, enhance data and process quality and precision, and provide real-time tracking and alerting. 

It is suitable for large-scale automation environments and offers sophisticated security features and compliance controls to guarantee the security of confidential data and processes. 

It can assist companies in streamlining processes, improving efficiency, reducing errors, and saving money, making it a useful instrument for groups of all sizes.

Tidal Automation is a complete automation program with an easy-to-use interface. However, it could be better in terms of user experience, customization, and cost. 

Some users have complained that the initial setup process is complicated and time-consuming, while others have suggested that the software could offer more freedom in customizing processes. 

Furthermore, Tidal Automation's pricing system may be a barrier for some companies; therefore, the software should consider providing more flexible pricing choices or discounts for smaller businesses.

My primary use case for using Tidal Workload Automation Software is its ability to handle job scheduling and automation. The software allows organizations to schedule and automate tasks across multiple platforms, applications, and systems, which helps in reducing manual intervention and improves efficiency. 

It can automate millions of jobs at very ease without any downtime. The software manages the workload very effectively. 

It provides real-time visibility into workload status and ensures that resources are being used for high-priority tasks.

Tidal Workload Automation Software helps organizations manage complex workflows, applications, and infrastructure in a more streamlined and effective manner.

Tidal Software also provides audit tracking and compliance reporting, allowing organizations to track job execution, changes, and approvals. Overall, it improves the compliance and governance of the organization.

The software can automate business processes such as financial reporting, order processing, and supply chain management which improves efficiency and increases productivity.

The best feature of Tidal Workload Automation Software is its ease of integration with other systems, including ERP, CRM, and BI tools. It allows users to automate workflows across multiple systems. This feature helps in simplifying complex workflows, minimizing manual efforts, and reducing errors. 

Another powerful feature is its job scheduling. This feature helps in optimizing the execution of workflows, minimizing delays, and ensuring that all the processes are completed on time.

The software also enables the users to create, modify, and navigate to the workflows at ease using its Visual Workload Automation feature.

The current user interface of Tidal Software is functional. However, it can be improved to make it more intuitive and user-friendly. This could include better navigation, more information dashboards, and customizable views.

For the next release, the software can be more involved with integrating machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities that could enable the software to make more intelligent decisions and optimize workload automation based on historical data, user preferences, and other factors.

I have been using Tidal Automation Software for the past year.

Tidal Workload Automation Software is primarily used for scheduling, monitoring, and managing critical business and IT workflows across an organization's IT infrastructure. 

This software automates the execution of various workflows, including batch jobs, data transfers, file processing, and application integration, among others. 

The software provides a centralized platform for managing and automating crucial business processes such as report generation and customer service operations. The software can be used in a variety of industries, including finance, health care, manufacturing, etc.

Tidal Workload Automation Software helped my organization to reduce operational costs by streamlining processes, eliminating errors, and minimizing the need for manual intervention. Additionally, automating tasks reduces the need for hiring additional personnel, which can result in significant cost savings.

Tidal Workload Automation Software provides the ability to quickly adapt to changing business requirements.

The software helps organizations to easily modify workflows to accommodate changes in business processes, and it can dynamically allocate resources based on changing workloads.

Tidal Workload Automation Software provides Role-based access control, ensuring that only authorized personnel can access sensitive data and workflows. This feature is essential because it helps organizations maintain security and compliance with industry-specific regulations.

Tidal Workload Automation Software offers dynamic job scheduling, allowing organizations to locate resources based on workload demands. This feature ensures the resources are efficiently utilized, which helps in improving the organization's productivity.

Tidal Software interface could be more intuitive and user-friendly. I felt a little difficult to find the features I need. A more streamlined interface could help improve usability.

With cyber threats increasing rapidly, Tidal could benefit more by improving the security features such as encryption and access controls.

Tidal software could be of more advantage if it gets integrated with popular DevOps tools such as GIT, Jenkins, and Docker could help to streamline workload automation and accelerate application development and deployment.

I have been using the Tidal Workload Automation Software for the past 1.1 years.