Tidal by Redwood Reviews

In our organization, we are running scheduled jobs in batches. There are three different uses for Tidal, which are primarily development, testing, and production. It's like the environment that allows you to run batch jobs in those three environments.

I do production, like systems administration, and the development of the batch environment. So, I install Tidal, maintain it, upgrade it, apply hotfixes, or do any type of system admin function. Also, I set up batch environments for development, QA, and production which run in Tidal. I also train people on how to use it.

In terms of deployment, we're on-prem. We've adapters and virtual machines, but everything is on-prem.

It streamlined the batch environments. It got everybody on the same page, and people haven't had to monitor their own jobs. We've been able to centralize the running of batch environments. We've been able to migrate various schedulers into one central location. It has helped with reducing risk by being aware of what's running and making sure that what needed to run did run versus something breaking somewhere and nobody knowing about it. Here, if something breaks, everybody would know about it, and then action would be taken. It has reduced risk and streamlined and centralized operations.

It's very versatile. We generally have SQL jobs. We've SQL, SSIS, PowerShell, C#.NET, etc. So, whatever a program is written in, and whether it runs on Windows, UNIX, Linux, or mainframe, there are just a wide variety of jobs it runs in different programming languages.

I've been an administrator for other schedulers over many years, which includes CA, AutoSys, Control-M, etc. Of all of them, Tidal is the easiest one to use. It's very GUI oriented, whereas a lot of the other schedulers have been command-line-based. It's by far the easiest scheduler to use for creating objects, which would be jobs, events, and things like that. It's all graphical. It's Windows-based. When building a job, most features are predefined. You just have to select where the executable is to run from and the time or event-based settings. You don't have to use the command line. Everything is kind of predefined for you. So, you just go through Windows and fill out different features in different jobs. It's simple. I've trained a lot of people on how to use it, and people who use Tidal for the first time are able to make jobs, whereas, with other schedulers, there are other things that they need to know, such as operating system-level commands. With Tidal, almost everything is already defined. You just tell it where to run the job from, which folder it's in, what's the name of the executable, and then the time when you want it to run. It can be learned within an hour. It's pretty cool.

I've used Tidal Automation to connect and integrate with a lot of different software and systems. I've used PeopleSoft, Informatica, BI, SQL Databases, VMware, Azure, and others. I haven't had any issues. So far, everything has been great. They have a compatibility matrix that ensures that different versions of Tidal will work with different software. They're good about keeping that up to date. Occasionally, you have to apply hotfixes to different software levels, but I've had good luck with the interfaces.

It is easy to integrate other technologies and processes via the REST API. All you need is access and a log-in ability, and it integrates well. You don't really need to do a lot of configuration.

It has increased capacity by manyfold in terms of the number of jobs and/or integrations. I've gone from 500 jobs to 1,500 in just six months. That's really in the first year of setting up Tidal. It worked that way at other companies too, with the same kind of jump.

I find a lot of them valuable. The versatility of being able to run on many different types of servers is valuable. There is also a versatility of different services that you could run jobs on. It's highly versatile. You can run a lot of different types of scripts on a lot of different types of servers. It interfaces with all of them.

The event-driven aspect of running a job when a certain condition is met is valuable. For example, if a file lands on a certain location, you can run a job. There's an interdependency feature where you can run Job 2 after Job 1 is done. You could set up all the jobs to run in a dependent order rather than in just chronological order. For example, other schedulers would only allow you to run jobs at a certain time, but with Tidal, you can have jobs run when files are present, other jobs have finished, or other conditions have been met. So, event-driven and dependency-focused elements of their scheduler are the ones I probably use the most.

Its user interface is great. It's easy to use and easy to administer, and it's versatile. It's not as complex as a lot of the other ones. I've used it at six different companies, and to me, it's the most versatile, easy to use, and dependable. I've had nothing but good luck with it. It's easily the best of the breed. It's the best scheduler for ease of use. I've used 10 of them at least, and it's by far the easiest.

They're among the best technical support teams I've had to work with. Among different software, they're the ones I prefer to work with.

The company is not really big. One of the areas that they are working on is improving the process of migrating jobs from the lower environment to the upper environment. They had used a tool called Transporter, which was a little difficult to use, but they've now released a new tool in August, which I've not yet used, to do that. It's probably called Repository or something like that, but it's a tool for migrating jobs from the lower environment to the upper environment. That's where they needed to improve, and it looks like they may have, but I haven't tried the tool yet.

They can do better reporting in terms of production statistics reporting.

I have used it for 14 years and about 3 months at six different companies.

It has been great. 

We've two data centers and about 20 users, 1,500 jobs, and 100 servers. That's pretty much the environment. We've development, testing, and production with the high availability feature from Tidal.

We've scaled up a lot in a short time, and it doesn't even matter. There is no limit. You could scale up to however many servers you need to, or however many jobs you need to. They don't care if you're running 10,000 a day or 500. It works just as well. You could scale up as much as you need to.

They've been great. They are very responsive. They have a lot of the original people back with them. The new company that owns Tidal is STA, and when they purchased Tidal from Cisco, they hired a bunch of people from the original Tidal software. So, they're very experienced. I often work with them closely, and they're very responsive and very knowledgeable. I've never had any issues with anybody there. It's all positive. I would definitely give them a 10 out of 10.

Their level of product knowledge has been great. It's very high at all levels, from tech support people to the product people. They're very knowledgeable about what is offered now, what's coming down the pipe, and what changes are being made. It has been impressive how much they all seem to know about different products.

A lot of times, I would have a problem that doesn't even pertain to their software. It's about something else and how it integrates, and they would find the person who knows the most about that interface, and then I would work with that person. So far, I've had great luck. They've been very helpful. They go beyond Tidal. If you have an issue with an ERP, they'll find the person who knows the most about that and work with you to get it integrated and working correctly.

Positive

I have used a lot of different solutions such as Autosys, Windows Tasks Scheduler, Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio, CA7, CA11, Control-M, and Maestro. In all cases, we've had all these different companies that we moved to Tidal. It was definitely the right thing to do. We switched because of a lot of better features. Tidal is easier to use, easier to integrate, and definitely easier to administer. It's also versatile. It has a lot of features that some of the other ones didn't have.

It was straightforward. We basically configure the new jobs in Tidal, get them okay, test them out, turn them off in the old schedulers, and turn them on in Tidal. It has been pretty straightforward. The whole deployment has been seamless so far.

We did it ourselves. We knew the legacy systems. So, we knew what the jobs did and we were able to deploy them. It was straightforward. It wasn't necessary to bring in consultants for that.

We primarily had three people. Their roles were database administrator, system administrator, and programmer or developer. Those were the three main functions that were needed.

Its maintenance includes normal monthly update patches. That's about it. Once a month, we apply patches, and there is also an occasional hotfix when there are bugs that have been fixed. I'm the only one who handles its maintenance.

It's productivity. I don't get involved in the financials, but efficiency and productivity have certainly increased. Risk has decreased. So, I'm sure the return has been well worth it.

I spoke with our CTO, and he realized its benefits within three months of deployment. So, within three months of me setting up Tidal and deploying jobs to it, we've seen benefits and reduced risk. That was from the CTO. It doesn't take long. It takes a couple of months to get everything working right, moved over, and set up.

In terms of Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), it has been helpful with infrastructure expenses. It has been an improvement because we've been able to use this tool to more closely monitor the infrastructure environment to take action faster whenever there are problems. By centralizing the jobs, we've been able to reduce the number of servers needed. So, we're simply able to run more efficiently using this tool, which I'm sure has provided a benefit to the overall infrastructure.

The tool needs to integrate with different APIs, which it does. A big part of the business includes other solutions that need to integrate with Tidal. Different business users around the company use different ERP systems and reporting systems, and it's important that those interface with Tidal and that Tidal is dependable, which it has been. It has been seamless. There haven't been any issues.

I'm only familiar with the on-prem licensing. I don't know about the cloud because we haven't done that. So far, they've been great. They're flexible about letting you test out some of the adapters before deciding if you want to buy them. If you buy different adapters, you get better prices on new ones.

They work with you on licensing. So, it has been great. Everybody has different licensing, but I've had good luck with the licensing. They've been very accommodating. You basically need to buy a license for each physical server, but then you're allowed an unlimited number of virtual servers.

There are no costs for upgrades and other enhancements. They just give you the upgrade files. We've been able to purchase more adapters because the cost of the product has been very reasonable. You pay for support, but it has been great.

In terms of flexibility and transparency regarding costs, the licensing that we've been using has been great. There were no surprises. It was as advertised. I don't know anything about cloud licensing because that's probably the next step. We haven't done that yet, but its licensing has been fine. We have no complaints. 

We've evaluated other schedulers. Tidal checked more boxes. The main difference was that it was easier to set jobs up. Everything is Windows-based. It's versatile, easy to administer, and easy to use. It has enough features and APIs to do everything we need it to do.

If you need a scheduler that's easy to use, dependable, and versatile and that doesn't require a lot of complexity, then I would recommend giving Tidal a strong look. Cost-wise also, it has been very reasonable. So, evaluate your needs, and if the needs involve versatility, scalability, and ease of use, then Tidal is definitely a suitable one.

I would definitely give it a 10 out of 10 because I've been working with them for many years at many companies, and I would recommend them to anybody looking for a scheduler.

I am a part of the sales operations team which deals with the pricing of products, getting the pricing set-up up in the system, collecting sales data from sales teams from various geographies, converting the files to a consumable format of Excel, getting the data uploaded on to the database, connect the database to reporting and data visualization tools like Power BI which helps us build reports, dashboards, and analyze business trends.

All of these tasks include a lot of manual processes that take a lot of time and effort.

The data needs to be uploaded to the database every time new data comes in. It could be a single line item or a thousand line item, data upload needs to be done manually and the DB job needs to run later we refresh reports and dashboards so that the new data gets populated. And all the necessary changes are made to the reports before they are published to services.

This is just a part of the daily routine and just this itself includes a lot of manual intervention. Tidal Automation has made it so simple by using time-driven and event-driven job scheduling and management. A significant amount of time and manual effort is now saved without compromising on the quality of the outcome.

Workload Automation has become simplified by Tidal Automation.

Tidal Automation is very efficient and can quickly automate most manual and repetitive tasks. It helps you save a lot of time and provides highly accurate output with minimal or no scope for error. The software has capabilities of handling errors and detecting failures which is a great feature and an added advantage to its users. Tidal Automation has abilities to manage and monitor jobs across various platforms and it is easy to integrate with other applications and services.

The initial set-up of the Tidal Automation is a bit complex and time-consuming; this can be eliminated by fastening the set-up process by reducing the number of steps involved.

The software can be made more user-friendly by producing effective training modules for new users and beginners.

The tool downtime can be reduced.

Understanding and using Tidal Automation could be overwhelming for someone with minimal programming language.

The above are minor challenges I can across, the product is cool and provides great services, and have not observed any major issues.

I've used the solution for less than a year.

The product is highly stable and will remain stable in the long run.

I find the software very useful and solved most of the problems on my team. I believe Tidal will be a great competition to other automation software out there.

My experience with customer service and support is great.

Positive

There were no automation tools used before.

The initial setup is a bit complex.

The initial setup was done in-house.

In terms of ROI, we have witnessed an:

• Increase in Productivity by ~28%
• Increase in Accuracy by ~8%

Tidal Automation licensing comes at affordable pricing and it is worth the features offered.

Microsoft SharePoint and Azure were also evaluated.

It's a great workload automation software that will simplify a lot of manual tasks.

It's mostly used for batch processing across our entire environment. We have approximately 16,000 servers and about 36,000 jobs defined and we run about 10 million jobs a month.

It's mostly VMs that we're using it on. Our physical footprint is pretty small.

I don't think we could work without Tidal or a similar solution. We do tens of millions of jobs a month, and for somebody to try to manually launch them and watch them would be physically impossible. Given that it was 20 years ago that we implemented this, we haven't lived that life in a long time, and we've grown significantly since then.

Because we've been on it for 20 years, it's pretty easy for us to automate jobs with Tidal at this point. It has become second nature.

It's pretty simplistic to set up and get going, although there are different levels of complexity you can have within the product. It depends on how simple you want to keep it. If you just keep it: Job A, Job B, Job C, Job D, that becomes pretty simple. But when you start integrating some complex calendars that use sub-calendars—and you can go three, four, or five deep to set up schedules—it becomes more complicated. The beauty of it is you can go as deep as you need to. We can get really complex or we can keep it simple. We have some use cases for both scenarios.

The thing that I like the most is the reliability of the engine. The actual scheduling part of the product is pretty much flawless, but the stability of the product is what I find to be reassuring. We are a financial company, we move billions of dollars a day, and if we don't have our transactions processed in a timely manner we can be penalized and our clients can be penalized. It can have a serious financial impact.

The user interface is the place that needs the most work. If and when we find issues with the product, they are usually in that area. If I had to choose, that's where I'd want issues, as opposed to in the engine. But the UI is average. It's a little sluggish at times and there are some bugs in it.

Also, we have a very large environment and the performance, at times, can be a little sluggish.

I've been on the Tidal platform for about 20 years.

The stability is the piece of the product that I absolutely love. The core part of the product works extremely well and I'm very comfortable with how it works and how it's designed. We rarely have any serious, production-impacting issues. We probably have at least four nines of uptime and availability.

Tidal's scalability has met all of our needs up to this point. We're not on all 16,000 servers, because we don't need to do processing on some of them. But we're probably around the 5,000-server mark with no issues at all.

The product continues to grow. We haven't adopted a lot of the new functionality that it has offered, because we're very comfortable with the way we do things and we make it work with what we know. Most of our applications are internally built, so we're not using SAP.

We've had contact with their technical support on a regular basis. Their product knowledge is slightly better than what I've seen with other vendors. If I ask to have something escalated, I normally get the attention I need. If we're dead in the water, their support is all-hands-on-deck and we get all the support we need. But some of our lower-priority items sometimes seem to get lost in the mix. 

Positive

It was quite a while ago, but we did not use another scheduler at the time. We used cron and Windows Scheduler, depending on the platform. They were embedded in the OS, as opposed to some type of fully-featured scheduling tool.

The reason we switched was that we were consolidating processing centers. We were going from 69 processing centers down to one, with one more for redundancy. We were taking all of our external spoke locations and bringing them in-house to one location. We couldn't manage 69 operators. We decided that this made more sense than going with some giant room with a whole bunch of operators in it.

I can't say I remember a lot about the setup, given that it was that many years ago, but I'm going to say it was fairly easy. At the time, Tidal was a very small company and we got handheld through the process by them. It was a slow rollout. We were very careful with how we did it. I can't remember anything negative from that experience.

There was a fairly large team involved, at the time. We are very siloed into what each of us does. We have a platform team, a storage team, and a network team. We had individuals from each one of those organizations around to stand up servers and set up the network. We needed security to set up our user accounts, not the user accounts for the product itself, but the user accounts for processing. It was a fairly decent size group. But it wasn't like we had a full-time security person working on it. That person may have done 10 hours' worth of work and they were done.

We have three admins who manage the environment and they're in the Tidal GUI all the time, every single day. But the general users in our operations center, who are watching for alerts and for failures, are not using the GUI at all.

It doesn't require that much maintenance. We really can't have a lot of downtime, so when we have to have downtime, it becomes a pretty big effort to plan that out and to validate that the processes we need to run can execute in a different environment. The maintenance itself is pretty easy, but we make it hard based on our business requirements. It's that same team of three who handle maintenance. Normally, one person takes on an upgrade.

We feel that the benefit is there for us. There's a good return on investment. There's no doubt. Being on the product for as long as we have, it's harder to quantify because we don't know what it was like without it. But compared to a scenario where we had a go with a different solution or some type of manual solution, the ROI with Tidal is very positive for us.

We definitely have a favorable cost of ownership. We are very satisfied with the product. Are there opportunities for improvement? Sure, like with anything. But we believe that the cost of ownership definitely outweighs the cost of not having ownership.

We think the pricing is very fair. We have been happy with the pricing compared to some of the other solutions in the space. We feel we get a good bang for our buck with this solution.

We're on a three-year ELA so it's very easy for us to budget. We know what the cost is. We can use as much as we want of what we're licensed for, which does not include the integrations with some of the other software products. It makes budgeting very easy. We just budget a number for a year and that's what it is.

The licensing model meets everything we need as far as the flexibility it gives us.

The core of the product is great and I would certainly recommend it. It does what you need it to do when you need it to do it. Are there issues? Sure, every product is going to have issues. But I feel very comfortable with the most important pieces of the product.

We integrate the solution with Oracle and SQL Server, but we don't use its connectors for SAP. The ease of integration via the REST API has gotten better. The API was lacking a little bit in the past. We've seen improvement, but we haven't put a ton of time and effort into integrating via the API. We do have some automation for disaster recovery, but in general, we haven't done a lot with the API.

It enables optimal scheduling of jobs by offering a range of job-associated functions. These functions encompass actions like restarting, resubmitting, terminating, revoking, modifying, pausing, resuming, and activating/deactivating scheduled tasks, all achievable with a single click. 

It helps us to save a lot of time by doing all the repetitive tasks very efficiently with no errors. It serves as a centralized hub for overseeing, scheduling and governing workflows. 

Overall, we can depend on Tidal for the smooth functioning of our tasks.

One of the greatest automation tools for managing a company's workload is Tidal automation. The best thing is that it has a direct connection to the hub of our system, which powers everyday operations for more than 15,000 jobs. By completing all the repetitious chores quickly and accurately, it saves us a lot of time. 

It acts as a center for controlling, planning, and managing workflows, projects, and jobs, and includes, among other things, the ability to schedule tasks, manipulate data, and transfer files.

The solution is an alerting mechanism at best, offering a comprehensive system that diligently provides timely alerts, promptly notifying stakeholders whenever a job teeters on the precipice of failure due to prolonged execution, or inversely, remains suspended in an unexpectedly protracted state, all while ensuring triumphant notifications reverberate through the digital channels upon job completion, fostering an environment of efficient operational oversight.

It's the most efficient tool for doing repetitive tasks and saves a lot of time with minimum possibility of error.

During patching activity or downtime, all the schedulers can be stopped and jobs are halted.

Every now and then, I catch myself pondering the possibility of enhancements within the user interface (UI), envisioning that through specific improvements, the UI might have the potential to provide a more polished and user-centric encounter, promoting seamless engagements and simplifying the navigation process for individuals interacting with the software.

Inexperienced users could face a slight obstacle due to the unavailability of easily accessible instructional videos. This is a resource that could have been extremely beneficial in helping them become acquainted with the platform at the outset. A lack of documentation might impede a smooth adaptation to the platform and postpone the capacity to fully utilize the software's complete array of features to the highest degree possible.

I've used the solution for more than eight months now.

We use Tidal to automate all the jobs within our IT applications, especially for our ERP, which is JD Edwards, as well as Oracle, and Microsoft. Currently, we execute 12,000 jobs per day through the platform.

It helps us make efficient and maximal use of our servers, from four in the morning until eight in the evening, with the maximum number of jobs executed automatically. We produce lenses for glasses in our factory and it's a 24/7 operation. The automation enables that, according to our requirements. Otherwise, we would need people to take action due to various dependencies, and it helps us avoid errors. 

We have to run about 12,000 jobs every day and the majority of them need to be launched from our ERP, JD Edwards. The native compatibility of the Tidal platform with JD Edwards dovetails with our greatest need. It's directly connected to the heart of our IT system. We couldn't work without it.

Nowadays, the UI is easy to use. Over time, with different versions, it has become better and better and now it's easy. It's very different than it was some years ago. It has improved.

We have never needed to use the REST API. The plugins provided by Tidal meet our integration needs completely. It integrates perfectly with our ecosystem, whether it's SQL Server, Windows, or our ERP.

One thing I would like to see improved is that, currently, when an action is executed and finishes in Tidal, it's marked as either "success" or "failure." I would like more options that would flag a job according to multiple options, rather than just "good" or "bad." We would like to be able to define five different types of results and proceed differently according to each one.

Tidal has told us that it's possible to do so through the product or with a workaround.

I have been using Tidal Automation for about 12 years.

It is very stable, fortunately. 

The scalability is fine for us.

We have not used their support very much over the last eight years. During that time, we may have submitted two tickets, because we are using the product in a very standard way. Generally, when we do need help, we call our partner.

Positive

We had a different scheduler before we started using Tidal but that was 12 years ago. We are very happy with the results of our switch. The product we used previously was Open Scheduler and we switched for two reasons. One was the cost of ownership of that product and the other was the set of requirements around our JD Edwards ERP solution.

The deployment was very simple. It involved the installation of an agent on a server. Nothing could have been simpler to install and use. We do have another data center coupled with our primary data center for high availability, so physically, there are two locations, but logically, they are one.

We currently have two people who work in Tidal, throughout the day, Monday to Friday. At other times, such as overnight and on weekends, we use managed services to work in Tidal.

In terms of major updates, there is only one every two years. There is very little maintenance needed.

We use a certified Tidal partner to help with upgrades and to be sure that everything is okay. It's so important that everything work perfectly that we prefer to use a consultant, even though we could do it ourselves. Our scheduler is in use 24/7. It never stops. It is the central piece of our IT operations. If it does not run properly, everything stops including production in our factory.

We have had a very good experience with our partner. We have been working with the same partner for 12 years and everything is working perfectly with them. We will be using their services again soon. They also help us with level-one requests.

The ROI is okay and that is why we continue to work with Tidal. Overall, the price is fair for the service we receive and the way it meets our automation requirements.

The most important measure, and our basis for comparison, is to look at the number of people who would be required to do the same thing.

There have been pricing increases, but with the reduction that our company obtained from Tidal this year, the pricing has become very acceptable for this type of product. It is fair, today, for what we use it for. If the price is increased, we may have to review things. 

We looked at other solutions but there weren't a lot of choices at that time because only two, Open Scheduler and Tidal, worked natively with JD Edwards. We went with Tidal mainly because of the way it works, with plugins, with JD Edwards.

Because my team has been using it for 12 years, they are used to it and have no difficulty using it. But in general, there is no problem using it daily.

For us, using the Graphical Views feature is the exception. It's not the easiest feature to use. We use it to present job flows, and the way they are organized and their dependencies, to our new people, because it makes things clear for them. But in general, we avoid using it and use the main screen. We know our applications well, so the tabular view is sufficient for us. It's more complicated to use the Graphical Views feature, for us, but that's based on what we have become used to using, day to day.

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.

Tidal has a great Interface that is user-friendly and easy to use.

It automates loads of tasks and complex workflows. 

The solution has increased efficiency and decreased manual interventions, which results in accuracy and productivity. 

One of the outstanding features is its flexibility; we can automate tasks of all sizes and complexity. 

Tidal integrates with other third-party systems, which makes it easy to connect and exchange data. 

Alert and notification features enable the user to know the status of the task.

It has simplified the complex workload by automating a huge number of tasks. We can configure and design even without coding knowledge. 

Tidal is a platform-independent software, which can be accessed in any browser. 

Error handling feature is amazing in Tidal, this improves business efficiency. A user-friendly interface makes users learn and navigate different modules quickly and effortlessly. 

Tidal is a valuable asset to our organization and will highly recommend it for implementation in businesses.

Tidal is versatile and a powerful automation tool. It has helped to streamline our business and improve the efficiency. It has reduced resource utilization and helps to automate tasks without any manual effort. 

It has great monitoring and managing features that track and respond to dependencies. Errors are identified and notified by the error handling functionality. It fixes the issues automatically, and error downtime is reduced - minimizing the failures.

Initially, it is complicated to understand the functionalities as there is limited product documentation. The setup and configuration of the software is a bit complicated. Providing the training videos for all the modules would be appreciated and It helps to gain more knowledge and understanding of the product. 

Support and assistance of the software should actively provide more service to end users. 

While performing the integration with other third-party systems, we experienced a lag and found it to be slow in performance

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.

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 is used for workload automation, batch jobs. It lets us run financial jobs, warehouse replenishment jobs, and reporting jobs across multiple applications, such as SAP, warehouse management systems, as well as our auditing system. We run something like 11,000 jobs every day across our enterprise.

The types of application middleware that we use it to automate include Azure Data Factory, data warehouse jobs, Azure Analysis Services jobs, our PDM database system, as well as our warehouse system that handles product reordering, picking and packing, and e-com orders.

The biggest improvement, and the reason that it was brought into the organization, is the creation of a cohesive set of job streams across multiple applications. An example would be if you order a coat on our website. That order goes through our e-com system. Eventually, it gets picked up by Tidal, handed off to our SAP financial system and order fulfillment system, and is then sent over to the warehouse management environment. Those applications enable us to collect the money and to know what we need to replenish. We also use them to get the coat ordered and sent to the person who ordered it. All of that is handled by different applications across our enterprise and Tidal gives us the way to schedule those in a single job stream that can be managed with dependencies and tracked.

Tidal has helped increase capacity, in terms of the number of jobs, but a lot of that has followed the increase in virtual machine and database capacity. We've gone from about 2,000 jobs a day to around 11,000 jobs a day. Tidal has been easily able to keep up with that capacity.

It has the ability to not only schedule jobs, so they run within a certain calendar time, but we can also trigger jobs ad hoc, and we can do that via email and file triggers, and in a variety of other ways. That has allowed me to build out flexibility for different team members and different needs throughout the year, depending on our sales cycles and our retail cycles. It allows people to run a job without even having to open the system.

The Graphical Views feature is also very good for helping us to understand a job stream. It's great for providing a visual overview of the status of a workflow, especially the Critical Path view. That is one of our favorites.

I'm the administrator and I keep the system healthy, but I don't monitor specific jobs. We have different folks who do that and they find it really nice to click on a job that's at the end of a long job stream and get an idea of its health, using the Graphical Views. Not every team uses them, but the folks who do really like them.

Tidal integrates with and connects to different systems to run the different jobs and it does that very well. There are connections from Tidal to SAP ECC, the warehouse management systems, et cetera. Not only does it do a great job running the jobs, but we get very valuable information back into Tidal about the health of a job. Did it run well? If not, what happened? It becomes a nice single pane of glass to find out if things are working the way we want. 

We also integrate it with our ticketing service management system, which is Cherwell. That works very well too. If a job fails, we integrate with Cherwell to create an incident that is then acted on and that has been pretty smooth.

If you have familiarity with APIs, it's a matter of just looking over the documentation and understanding Tidal's way of using the API, and then you can build integration with PowerShell scripts. That's something we're doing with the Cherwell integration to bring data from Tidal into Cherwell.

The ease of drilling down into details using the Graphical Views is moderate because there is a little bit of a learning curve. It could be a little easier, but it's definitely not bad.

Similarly, the user interface is moderate. They've improved it but there is room for more improvement. I'm so used to it now that it's second nature, but I do handle the training for our new users and that gives me an idea that sometimes it's confusing as you start to get into it. The company is working to improve it, from what I understand.

I would also like to see more of a cloud/hybrid solution. I know they're working towards it, but I would like to see that sooner. Currently, it is on-prem and that's fine because most of the applications it supports are also on-prem, but there is potential for more applications to move to the cloud. It would be nice to have a hybrid solution.

Also, when we patch to the next version, there is often a little thing that breaks. It has rarely been a big deal, but I always seem to have to follow up on one tiny issue. It would help if they had some better QA testing of their patches. It could be I'm just too aggressive on patching, but at the same time, better testing would be good. Whenever I do open a ticket, they follow up on it quickly and I get great service, but I'd rather not open a ticket.

I have been using Tidal Automation for eight to nine years.

We have only ever had one system outage related to Tidal that was Tidal's fault. That's pretty amazing for a product that we use all the time.

We're a medium-sized company at 11,000 jobs and we're using just one instance for that. My understanding is that it can scale out to hundreds of thousands of jobs, depending on how you implement it. We're in a good space and we would be able to scale out if we needed to. I don't see us needing to, but my understanding is that there are companies that use it on a much larger scale.

Over the years, they have built out connections to different types of systems that they didn't originally support. Azure Data Factory is new in the last eight years, and that means that Tidal didn't always need a connection to that system. They build out those types of connections and they work to stay current and to work with the applications that are out there. I see them striving to stay relevant, in a good way.

Tidal does a nice job of continuing to educate its customers on their solutions and what they're modifying or doing to provide new features. They have quarterly webinars that are very informative. I also find that our customer service rep is very informative. If I have a need for a demo of something that is new, I can reach out, get it scheduled, and they'll do a demo for it.

We have the solution deployed in a single data center where we have our production environment. We also have it in separate QA and dev environments. We connect to about 18 applications across our enterprise. Our total number of users is about 150, but on a weekly basis there are 20 to 30 people who use it heavily, people who are always in the system doing things.

One of their strongest areas is their customer service. Many of the same folks have worked at Tidal over the years. I have gotten to know some of the technical support people and we've built up a relationship. I can ask them questions and get answers that I trust. We've had our customer service rep for years, so I see a lot of consistency with their staff and the knowledge they have. 

If you submit a question and they discover it's a bug, they're good about getting it into a hotfix quickly, depending on the urgency of it. I find them to be really responsive and I find them to be knowledgeable and friendly. On the "people side," there is definitely very strong customer service and support.

I rate their support a 10 out of 10, especially compared to other situations I've run into.

Positive

I wasn't around for building out the original jobs, but I've had to install it on different systems as we've migrated, and it's pretty easy to install when moving to a new system. You just pick up the database, bring it over, and do a little bit of configuration.

Once you get comfortable with the system, it's pretty easy. It's consistent. There's always a learning curve, but it's moderate. It's not hard but it's not easy because you do have to learn things.

The amount of maintenance is pretty low. We patch it about three times, although they have patches that come out quarterly. The patches do two things: they fix issues and introduce new features. I'm usually patching because I'm interested in the new features. We could patch less, but we do it that often as a company choice. But in terms of keeping it healthy, we haven't had a lot of big issues related to Tidal, which is very good. The level of maintenance involved is good. I handle it on my own. It's not a complicated system, from a maintenance and support standpoint. That makes it a lot easier to keep healthy.

We have absolutely seen ROI. It's not just that it's critical to our company, but I also feel that there is definitely return on investment because of the good support.

We are satisfied with the pricing of Tidal. It's in the moderate range and it feels very achievable for us.

The base product itself, Tidal Automation, is licensed by the connections that you have to other systems. We review those whenever licensing comes up. If you want to add something like Tidal Explorer, or other modules, there is an additional cost.

They have modified the licensing model a few times and there has been a bit of a learning curve, which is expected, but in general, it seems to be clear and transparent. And they're very willing to talk to you and answer questions if you have them.

A few years ago we looked at Stonebranch Universal Automation Center, and we've occasionally looked at Control-M, to see what else is out there. 

From a cost perspective, Tidal beats them both, and we've had such good support from Tidal that it makes it harder to think about leaving, especially since the product works very well. Right now, we're not looking at anything else, but I always keep my ear open because you never know.

Work with the folks who own the systems where the jobs will run, so that you understand what your needs are, and leverage Tidal's customer support to come out, give you demos, and to help you get started. Their documentation is actually pretty good, it has improved over the years, so if you want to read it you can, and it will be helpful.

As the only support person for Tidal in our company, I'm very motivated to stay on top of things. That means I do a lot of training to make sure that my users, the people who build out the schedules, are knowledgeable and understand how to respond to issues.

I have also set up a lot of alerts that give me an idea of things that might have issues. All of that is done using Tidal's tools, which is great, to keep me on top of things.