ActiveBatch by Redwood Reviews

The primary use case of using ActiveBatch Workload Automation Software is that it enables IT teams to define, schedule, and execute a wide range of batch jobs and workflows, including file transfers, database changes, and application integrations (and much more), all from a single central platform. 

The software can automate mission-critical business processes with ease. My work environment has a large number of applications that must be handled simultaneously. In this scenario, the software really helps to monitor all the processes, which reduces manual intervention and human error while increasing productivity.

My organization's IT operations have been made more efficient by Active Batch, which automates time-consuming, repetitive procedures. The active batch may assist in making sure that crucial activities are carried out in the proper sequence and at the appropriate time with the use of features like job dependencies, event triggers, and notifications. 

Additionally, the software offers real-time monitoring and reporting features that let IT teams keep tabs on the progress of their batch operations and workflows. 

Overall, the software helps organizations improve the reliability and performance of their IT systems.

The Active Batch Workload Automation Software has a feature that I truly appreciate: it automatically distributes workloads over various servers and resources, improving performance and ensuring that the necessary resources are used for the right jobs. 

The software also supports a wide variety of platforms and applications, including Windows, Linux, Unix, and many more popular enterprise applications, making it a flexible and versatile solution for automating critical business workflows. I highly recommend the software.

While ActiveBatch is a robust and comprehensive workload automation software, I feel that it will be of great help if it is improved in the following areas:

As more organizations are moving towards a cloud-based infrastructure, ActiveBatch could incorporate more capabilities that support popular cloud platforms, such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. 

Active Batch could also offer deeper integration with DevOps tools to enable more streamlined and automated software development processes. 

Apart from these enhancements, everything about the software is highly appreciated.

I have been using this solution for the past six to 12 months.

We have roughly 8,000 jobs that run every day and they manage anything from SaaS to Python to PowerShell to batch, Cognos, and Tableau. We run a lot of plans that involve a lot of constraints requiring them to look at other jobs that have to run before they do. Some of these plans are fairly complicated and others are reasonably simple.

We also pull information from SharePoint and load that data into Greenplum, which is our main database. SharePoint provides the CSV file and we then move it across to Linux, which is where our main agent is that actually loads into the Greenplum environment.

Source systems acquire data that goes into Greenplum. There are a number of materialized views that get populated, and that populating is done through ActiveBatch. ActiveBatch then triggers the Tableau refresh so that the reports that pull from those tables in Greenplum are updated. That means from just a bit after source acquisition, through to the Tableau end report, ActiveBatch is quite involved in that process of moving data.

We have 19 agents if you include the Linux environment, and 23 if you count the dev environments. It's huge.

It's on-prem. We manage the agents and the scheduler on a combination of Windows and Linux.

We have some critical processes in ActiveBatch that go to finance and to the auditors in our organization. Those processes are highly critical because that allows us to trade. If those reports don't get to them, we get penalized by the government or by APRA or by some financial institutions. ActiveBatch, in this particular case, is absolutely critical for getting those reports out.

We have SLAs requiring us to get reports out by a certain time of day or by a certain day of the month, by a certain time. We're judged on whether those reports go out. ActiveBatch, being as stable as it, is only impacted by external factors like the network and database performance. But otherwise, we are quite comfortable with the way ActiveBatch is able to handle these jobs without our having to look at them.

Because the connections between ActiveBatch and other tools are automated, it gives us more time to do other things, and more interesting things. If something goes wrong, we can go back and have a look in the logs that are produced and that explain what's going on, and we can then repair it. It's an enabler, and it provides us with more time to get on with other jobs. It's something that's critical and it runs by itself and we're really happy it does that. We have that time available because we're not actually manually babysitting processes.

It provides a central automation hub for scheduling and monitoring, bringing everything together under a single pane of glass, absolutely. There is finance, sales, marketing. Pretty much every department has a job that we deal with. It's quite heavily integrated into our whole stack. As an insurance company, our major events department, for example, is critical because every time there's a storm or a hail event or a cyclone somewhere, those reports must get out in a timely manner. I can't think of any department that isn't impacted by ActiveBatch, running some report for them.

The single pane of glass helps the DataOps team manage all of the processes that are supported by ActiveBatch as the main scheduling tool. We've created a dashboard which pulls information from ActiveBatch, information that we can share with the organization. They can look at jobs and the schedules and, if necessary, run their own jobs from that point. It's like the lungs of our company.

Overall, it has helped to improve workflow completion times by 70 to 80 percent, easily. Once you've built a job, it just runs and no one has to concern themselves with it doing what it's doing. They will get the notification or the file or the email that says it's processed and they move on with their day.

In addition, we had a guy who was spending seven hours in a week to extract, compile, and then export information into a CSV file, and then another few hours to get it transferred to another department. We were able to build a PowerShell script, with a query that could easily be updated, that was automated through ActiveBatch. It takes 10 minutes to run. What that guy was doing in hours, we are now doing within minutes.

One of the valuable features is the ability to tie ActiveBatch into other applications using API calls. The native integrations and REST API adapter for orchestrating the entire tech stack are very good and user friendly. We have a product called ServiceNow, which is a call tracking system. If a problem occurs, ActiveBatch will send an API call into ServiceNow, and it will raise a ticket to say that there's a problem. That gives us an auditing process. We're also using API calls for Tableau and we're also using some API calls for SharePoint. We tie ActiveBatch into a lot of different applications.

Also, the overall ease of use is brilliant. It's easy to pick up. We can get a newbie up and running within a day, using ActiveBatch. It's not to the extent where that person will know some of the more complicated issues, but in terms of being able to build a job and export or run the job, it's within a couple of hours. Within a day, people are quite comfortable with the application. We've just signed an agreement with ActiveBatch which gives us all the education materials now. That means we'll be applying more advanced features. It's really good as far as ease of use goes.

We use the solution across all sorts of organisational branches. It's used for SaaS and SAP, which is finance. We have fraud and Salesforce, which is for the sales group. It's also used with marketing and major events because, when there's a storm, we need to know what's going on. We also have the ability to pull from external sources, meaning external vendors such as Guidewire. So ActiveBatch is widely utilised and probably more widely utilised than the executives realise. It's well embedded in our company.

We have moved to version 12, and I believe that interface is more of a "webbie" look and fee. 

A nice thing to have would be the ability to comfortably pass variables from one job to another. That was one of the things that I found difficult. Other than that, it's all good.

I've been with this company for over 10 years and it was already here before I arrived.

The most valuable feature is its stability. We've only had very minor issues and generally they have happened because someone has applied a patch on a Windows operating system and it has caused some grief. We've actually been able to resolve those issues quite quickly with ActiveBatch. In all the time that I've had use of ActiveBatch, it hasn't failed completely once. Uptime is almost 100 percent.

With those 8,000 jobs that run in a 16-hour period, the majority of the time we're spending about an hour of the day with ActiveBatch, repairing problems. There are issues where we have to re-run a job because of it exceeding its runtime. Or when a job fails, even though the alert goes out to the end user, we still have to tap the user on the shoulder and say, "Did you look at this alert? We've got a problem here, can you please fix it?" Other than that, it pretty much runs itself. Overall, ActiveBatch saves us a huge amount of time, being as stable as it is.

If we were having to repair everything, on an ongoing basis, we would be spending more than five or six hours a day, so we are saving at least five to six hours a day by using this tool. The improvement to the business is quite substantial. People aren't having to manually do anything that would normally take them two or three hours to do. Those things are being done within a matter of minutes and then passed on. And those five or six hours are just for us in our department. You can multiply that by the number of people who would normally have done something manually and who now have it done through ActiveBatch in minutes.

We're looking at more than a 98 percent success rate for uptime and for running jobs. The only time that something falls over is not to do with ActiveBatch itself, rather it's to do with problems with either the network, the database, or developers.

The scalability is brilliant. We've got 23 machines. We have redundancy integrated into this environment. 

If a server goes down, we can turn that queue off and re-queue those jobs to another server, while we get a new image spun up and restarted. In that situation, the delay is in getting the IT guys to spin up the image. If we could get an image spun up when it failed, it would be a matter of five or 10 minutes to be back in business with that server. As it is, once the IT guys do spin it up, we kick off from there.

The main interface is used by about 12 people. The dashboard that we've built on top of it is probably used by 70 to 80 people. But the number of people it affects is in the thousands across the entire organization.

It's heavily utilized across a number of departments in the organization and they really do rely on ActiveBatch to stay up and stable and to provide their reporting mechanisms.

We've had a couple of issues where we've had to log a defect with ActiveBatch. But the guys at ActiveBatch are really responsive. We had things fixed in 24 hours, and they're in a different time zone. The response time is exceptional. This is one of the few vendors that I can say is highly responsive and that shows a level of commitment that I don't think many other organizations show.

Positive

ActiveBatch replaced Windows Scheduler, Chrome jobs that had been running on some servers. There was also another scheduling tool that popped up somewhere but that data was moved into ActiveBatch. The scheduling from Cognos was also moved into ActiveBatch because it was more convenient, and some of the Tableau scheduling was moved into ActiveBatch as well.

The initial setup was straightforward. It's super-easy to install and super-easy to set up. Even on the Linux box, it was really easy to install and set up and run. There was no real complexity in the installation process.

Most of the time with setup or upgrades is spent testing. We usually deploy agents within 20 minutes. The scheduler and the database might take an hour and a half, but because the agents are on virtual machines, we have an image and we just spin that image up. If something goes wrong, we can just spin up a new image and get that agent started straight away. In terms of testing, when we do disaster recovery, we redeploy to a disaster recovery environment and then we test that the connections are working, the jobs are running, and that there are no problems. That's where most of the time is spent, not in the deployment itself.

We usually have two people involved in the process, one who is the primary and one who is the secondary. And then we have a couple of people on standby. The primary does the installation and the secondary is looking over their shoulder for learning purposes. Then we have a few people on the IT side in case there is a problem with the operating system or the network that we have to deal with, but they're not involved until there's a problem. The DBA is also on-call just in case there's an issue with the database.

Maintenance-wise, it's only if something happens that we go and look. We have a job that looks at the health of the database that ActiveBatch uses. It's pretty much all automated, so it looks after itself. We have another job that pings the servers to make sure that all the ports that it needs are running and open. We also have jobs that look at the network latency so that if the network latency is beyond a certain point, it notifies IT and us. It also looks at the operating system and the actual directories. Unless we schedule it for an upgrade, which we do every six months, we don't look at maintenance for that six months unless there's a problem.

ActiveBatch has been implemented in-house.

It pays for itself because it gives the DataOps team more time to be involved in other projects. It allows the organization to move forward without having to worry about doing anything manually. ActiveBatch is performing a huge service to the organization in terms of reducing the number of man-hours required to do manual tasks.

If you compare ActiveBatch licensing to Control-M, you're looking at $50,000 as opposed to millions.

ActiveBatch isn't the only scheduling tool that we have. There's also a product called Control-M, but control-M is a lot more expensive and mostly manages mainframe. ActiveBatch is at a very modest price for running a very complex process.

We can expand ActiveBatch more readily than Control-M because, with Control-M, you pay for X number of runs in a run book. If you want to extend that run book, they want half-a-million dollars, or more, for 500 jobs. We can expand ActiveBatch. We could go to 10,000 jobs and it wouldn't cost us any more. It's only if we were to add more agents to load balance that we would be charged any more, and it wouldn't be anywhere near what Control-M charges.

I've mainly been involved with ActiveBatch and it's hard to compare another vendor when there hasn't been a vendor to compare against. As far as performance is concerned, Control-M and ActiveBatch are on par, but they're not the same because Control-M is really just moving files and running programs on mainframes, whereas we're running against Windows and Linux environments.

The other one that's being utilized at the moment is Apache Airflow, but that's more for the developers because they like to be able to program the backend, rather than to use a frontend interface. We've been looking at how that works, but we haven't seen it to be very stable for a production environment. You can't compare Airflow with ActiveBatch, in effect.

My advice would be to jump on it straight away. With the ease of installation, the expandability or scalability of the product across multiple servers with different agents, the ability to not only use Windows but Linux as well, and the fact that you can build complex plans that have multiple constraints, multiple types of scheduling, and multiple types of alert mechanisms, it's highly expandable. You're going to have a lot of fun with it.

It's highly flexible and easy to use. In terms of what we can do, we still haven't gone to the Nth degree of what we can't do with ActiveBatch. It's incredibly flexible. We're running shell scripts that run Python scripts. We've got PowerShell scripts and batch scripts. We tie into different applications. We still haven't exhausted the potential of ActiveBatch. That's what I've learned.

Predictability is something that is out of the control of ActiveBatch. We can set a job to run against a database, but it's really going to be the network or the database that will impact ActiveBatch. ActiveBatch will continue to run. There is an average run time that we look at, but if the network has high latency or the database is under load, the time will increase. ActiveBatch will continue to run as normal. The frequency of ActiveBatch failing is quite rare.

We use the ActiveBatch interface up to a certain point, and then we start looking at running Python and shell scripts. That's why we have the Linux agent. We call a shell script which runs a Python script that does some manipulation and passes that information back. And then there are a number of plans that manipulate the process. In this particular plan, the CSV file is created and it's dropped into a file location. ActiveBatch is polling for that location. It sees that file. Then a Python script runs and creates an MD5 hash. When you download a file from the internet, there's an alphanumeric number that indicates whether that file is valid or not. The MD5 hash is generated on the file and when it's moved to another location, another MD5 hash is generated to determine whether there was a change in that file when it moved from A to B. It's a validation to make sure that no data was corrupted during the movement from where the file was dropped to where the file landed. Once it has been validated, the file is then moved into another location where it's uploaded into the Greenplum database and a notification is sent to whomever was involved in that particular process. It's quite involved.

If a job fails, we have set it to wait for a few minutes and to then re-run. If that fails, we can trigger another job to continue on in that process flow, if the failed job isn't critical. Some of the plans are quite complicated and have a certain amount of logic involved, but that enables us to navigate around problems that might otherwise need a developer's assistance, if it doesn't affect the overall plan process. As long as there are no constraints involved that require the next job to run, and it can move around that job and continue on, that's how we set it up.

We're looking forward to version 12 to see how that goes as well. We've also mirrored the database, the backend database that ActiveBatch uses. We have a failover process which was just recently installed. If one database fails, we can switch over immediately to the other database in real time.

Overall, we're really comfortable with how ActiveBatch is performing and with what it's doing.

We are using ActiveBatch to automate as many of our processes as we can, limiting the amount of time operators are running recurring jobs. Included in that is about 99.5 percent of our nightly cycles. We call a mixture of executables: SSIS jobs, SQL queries, and PowerShell scripts. We also call processes in both PeopleSoft and another third-party package software.

As an IT department, we do solutions for the entire business and control everything. Our nightly cycles affect everybody in the company, so we do have some jobs that we run in one department, then create output which goes to another department. Based on email distribution lists, we can let anybody in the company know when things run.

We don't really use ActiveBatch for sharing knowledge. It's more for sharing output. We have some processes that run SSRS reports that distribute links to many people across the organization all at once, so they all get the same data fed to them simultaneously.

The most complex process that we run is our nightly cycle, which is made up of about 230 individual jobs triggered based on other jobs completing or files showing up in the system. It integrates a mixture of executables, a third-party policy system called LifePRO, and PeopleSoft. With all the handshaking back and forth between the systems, it allows an operator to start a job at around eight o'clock at night. Then, at around two in the morning, the last job finish with very minimal interaction from the operator, who is more sitting there watching to see if a job fails or not.

The operator used to run a job for our nightly cycles and go off doing something, then they would come back to see if the job was finished. If it was, they would start the next job. With the operator's intervention, this entire process would run for around eight hours. We have managed to streamline that down, because we're no longer waiting for an operator to look for a job completion, to run in about five hours. This allows us to have one nighttime operator instead of two, so we have cut the number of staff at night in half.

Additionally, daytime jobs are what we are starting to focus on now to allow our daytime operators to basically sit there and watch different jobs run. We'll be retraining both the nighttime and daytime operators to do different jobs. For example, with our nighttime operator, while the job is running in the background, she doesn't have to do anything anymore. She has now been tasked with other systems, like upgrading servers, and doing other things that cannot be done when the majority of our staff are in the building. So, not only have we removed half of our nighttime staff, we have repurposed our one person whose there to do both jobs.

Internally, we ran a number of executables. Our operators used to run these jobs all manually and press buttons within our console. Now, all those processes are automated. The operator doesn't do anything. We have a number of reports that just get generated automatically throughout the course of the night or based on their own dependency. The operators used to have to wait for a specific job to finish before they could do all these pieces. Currently, those just automatically trigger on their own. In addition to that, with our financial system, PeopleSoft, we can call any job within it automatically. This is without our operators even opening up the PeopleSoft console. In our LifePRO policy system, we have about 150 jobs that we can call those automatically as well, including some daytime jobs that run processes every five minutes. Instead of having the operator sit there like Homer Simpson pressing a button, these jobs trigger automatically, ensuring that all the data is kept updated in real-time.

It is a system that calls other jobs. Therefore, it will return error codes from those other systems. If it's a job that is truly an ActiveBatch job and doing biomanipulation, it will return error codes. The logs associated with those error codes are usually pretty in-depth to let you know exactly what happened. This prevented problems from becoming fires. We have an email that goes out every day with a list of all the jobs that failed to ensure that we hit every single one and can take care any issues.

We have one job that runs every 30 minutes, handling batch input into our system. If one of those jobs fails, then it keeps the rest of them from working the rest of the day. Then, if one of those fails, the entire team that supports that is notified immediately, giving them the full amount of time to rectify the issue before the next time that process runs. In the past, when this was done manually, we would have to wait for someone to notice that there was an error and then find the right person to deal with it. Now, within 10 seconds, an email has been sent out saying, "There is an issue. Fix it."

For our nightly cycles, we have some cycles that will run from start to finish without a single error because it is controlling when jobs run. It does a lot of clean up before the system starts. Therefore, it knows where certain files are supposed to be and where they are. So, we don't have to worry about somebody clicking the wrong button; everything runs from start to finish.

We can control the runtime of files, based on timing, by a file showing up. They can be controlled by an email being sent into the system. We get error codes back. Therefore, we have one centralized location where we can see how jobs are running. We have the ability to notify end users when jobs are finished or if there are problems with jobs. It's a very robust system, which allows for a lot of different functionality.

The system is very easy to use. In a short amount of time, we trained a couple people who have been able to create jobs on their own. For the two people whom I have trained so far, I spent about an hour or two with them. They were able to start creating minor jobs themselves by looking at existing jobs. We gave them minor jobs to work on. Then, within a couple hours, they were able to create jobs and processes that work correctly.

A lot of our processes are jobs that we know run one job after another, along with a hierarchical system, e.g., once this one job finishes, it triggers these three. Then, as soon as those three are done, it triggers a fifth job. The scheduling of those in that format is very easy to do. 

You can set up automated controls where as soon as one job finishes, then another one kicks off. You can put in constraints where a job won't start until other situations are met. It's very easy to use.

The console is very easy and flexible to use. Whenever we have come up with something that we wanted to try in ActiveBatch, we have managed to find a solution. When you're calling an application, you can call it through a batch job or script. You can also call the executable directly or through PowerShell. Depending on how it's running and how the security needs to pass through the system, there are many different ways to get the processes to work.

ActiveBatch provides a central automation hub for scheduling and monitoring, bringing everything together under a single pane of glass. There is a daily activity screen within ActiveBatch that shows you every job currently running. You can look in the past and future. I think you can set it all the way up to seven days in the future. So, if you have jobs scheduled to run on a timeframe, then those will show up. It will show everything that is on hold. You can limit it down to show only the stuff that has run in the last hour, if you are trying to deal with a specific problem. You can set the ranges, to say, "Okay, show me between 5:00 and 8:00 PM." It is very easy to use in that regard.

It handles a lot of different business-critical system for us. We have applications that our agents use out on the field which trigger other things that run in the office. Those run every five minutes looking for input to make sure that we can keep things running smoothly. Things that we would have needed to have the operators, or somebody, just running every couple of minutes, we have about a dozen of those run automatically looking for input to keep things running. It also allows our financial system to integrate with all our other systems without anybody having to do the work. Our whole nightly cycle is automated through this. We just did an inventory, and I think we have about 500 unique jobs that we run through ActiveBatch now. These are things that somebody would have had to run manually in the past.

You can keep history of run times, so you can start setting up SLAs on job performance. We have one job setup now where if that job takes more than 15 minutes to run, then it automatically aborts the job, sending an email saying, "This job needs to be looked at, as it's running past its run time."

The have done a pretty good job with the operator interface. There are a number of different screens which can be used to see what is going on. We have chosen the daily activity screen because it gives the most complete view of what's going on: what's finished, what's failed, and what's currently running.

The performance on ActiveBatch has been stellar.

There are some issues with this version and finding the jobs that it ran. If you're looking at 1,000 different jobs, it shows based on the execution time, not necessarily the run time. So, if there was a constraint waiting, you may be looking for it in the wrong time frame. Plus, with thousands of jobs showing up and the way it pages output jobs, sometimes you end up with multiple pages on the screen, then you have to go through to find the specific job you're looking for. On the opposite side, you can limit the daily activity screen to show only jobs that failed or jobs currently running, which will shrink that back down. However, we have operators who are looking at the whole nightly cycle to make sure everything is there and make sure nothing got blocked or was waiting. Sometimes, they have a hard time finding every item within the list.

Now, it integrates well with our other solutions. There were some issues initially with getting ActiveBatch to work, but once we found a solution that worked, it was easy to replicate. The initial issues were a mixture of the fact that very few people had done this type of work before, and partly the person we had working on it at the time. We're not sure exactly what the issue was. We actually reached out to ActiveBatch who helped us to get this to work. 

It is a very complex application because the code we are trying to connect to was COBOL based and still dealt with INI files. So, we had to trick the system into thinking it was calling the system the exact same way. Once we did, everything worked fine, including getting the error messages back and being able to display them within ActiveBatch.

It was the connection between systems that became complex. Basically, we had to set about a dozen environment variables within a script in ActiveBatch. So, when we called the outside application, all those variables were set and we could understood what it was trying to do. The complexity was on the actual calling of the third-party application. It was not from the ActiveBatch side.

You have to be careful with automation tools. We had one job where the person who initially programmed it created an infinite loop, so it kept triggering itself. It ran for less than a second, so we couldn't stop it. 

The company has been using ActiveBatch for about five or six years. I have been using it for about three years.

Stability-wise, there is only one function that we have had trouble with. We haven't even reached out to ActiveBatch to try and figure it out because we're trying to figure out what is causing it. There is one DLL within the system that gets the current date, but will just stop working from time to time. The rest of the system is very stable. On occasion, we will have to reboot a server to release some locks on things, but that's once a month where we have to do anything like that.

I maintain all the jobs in production. There is nothing out of the ordinary that needs to be done. It does its own self-cleanup. It also deletes history periodically on its own.

We started with just a few jobs and are right now up to 500 jobs that we run. When adding new things, it allows you to put everything in its own folders, so you can keep track of different parts. You can flag them as part of different systems, if you want. As we have added more things, we have seen no degradation in the performance.

We use it more as an automation tool, so it is just running jobs. In terms of people who go into ActiveBatch to look at it, we have our two daily operators who go in and look how things are running. We do have some jobs that they go in and trigger, because we're still automating the actual execution of these jobs, but they're all still controlled from ActiveBatch. We have a number of programmers, probably about a dozen, who will go into ActiveBatch. Some will tinker around with creating jobs that they need in our test system. Some will go into production to see how their jobs ran, if they're supporting the system. They can go in and see what the end result was, if it came back successful, had a warning, or an error. They can look at the logs to see what the problem was, allowing them to fix the process themselves.

Right now, we don't have any end users going into the system directly. We're building them a web interface front-end where they will be able to trigger specific jobs, so they can see the jobs that they can control. We have it setup through the ActiveBatch API so it returns the results to that web interface of how the job ran the previous time and when it ran last.

Our nightly cycle is 99.5 percent automated right now. We're finishing up the last few pieces of that. We have started looking at all of our daytime operator jobs. Those are being worked on next. All of our reports sent out to users on a daily basis are all automated within ActiveBatch to be triggered at specific times and sent out. The next piece that we will be working on is giving our programmers the ability to bring up Azure sites as needed, then we will be starting to add in all of our FTP jobs into ActiveBatch as well.

In the past, we haven't used their technical support that much. The few times that I have called and asked them questions, they have been very easy to work with and get the answers from. They are in the process of changing their whole structure on how they support their clients, along with having their pricing structures change. 

They are trying to make the system more user-friendly from the support side, so you can go and look for the information yourself as opposed to trying to call someone.

Previously, we have only used some scheduling through Microsoft Schedulers and SSRS schedulers.

I was not involved for the initial setup. Though, the installation of ActiveBatch was straightforward. 

I was involved the last time that we did an upgrade. Everything was straightforward. Moving the jobs from one version to the next was relatively straightforward. The initial application that they picked to interface with was one of our more complex ones. That may have been why the person who was doing the program initially had an issue, because nobody had done this before with this type of system. 

There are a lot of APIs for packages that you can get with ActiveBatch for doing connections. We don't use a lot of their integration tools, though it does integrate with a lot of different ones. The one we do use right now is PeopleSoft. The issues with the integration of PeopleSoft have been more on the PeopleSoft side, not the ActiveBatch side. We had to reconfigure how we had PeopleSoft setup, so it would allow outside applications to communicate into it.

Once we decided to do the installation, I think it was done in the course of a day over a weekend.

We did the installation ourselves. It was done by our systems department. One of my coworkers did all the work. She installed the new system and exported everything out of the old version into the new one. On top of that, we broke one system into two, because we used to have our model and production on one server. In the course of upgrading to version 12, we put our test and production systems on different servers.

Since we are no longer waiting for an operator to see that a job is finished, we have changed our daily cycle from running in eight hours down to about five. We had a third shift-operator retire and that position was never refilled.

The person who used to run all these jobs now just watches the system run. She is doing other stuff while she is working. On top of that, with the pandemic, we have managed to be able to allow our second shift operator to run everything remotely from home. They don't even have to be in the building anymore to run our cycles.

The central automation hub for scheduling and monitoring brings everything together under a single pane of glass by streamlining everything:

1. It takes less time to run everything.
2. It's less expensive because we no longer have the extra operator running jobs.
3. There is less chance of an operator clicking the wrong button because we run both a test system and production system side by side. In the past, where they might have run the job in the wrong system, this makes sure that the correct system is running the right jobs.
4. It automatically will send an output where it needs to go in real-time. We have management reports that used to have to be run by an operator. Now, if management comes in early, the report is there just waiting for them.

Make sure that the pricing is in the contract.

ActiveBatch is currently redesigning themselves. In the past, they were a low cost solution for automation. They had a nice tool that was very inexpensive. With their five-year plan, they will be more enhancement-driven, so they're trying to improve their software, customer service, and the way that their customers get information from them. In doing that, they're raising the price of their base system. They changed from one pricing model to another, which has caused some friction between ActiveBatch and us. We're working through that right now with them. That's one of the reasons why we're why we were evaluating other software packages. For the time being, we are staying with ActiveBatch because we like it the best of the four.

Up until now, if you wanted to do a training class through them or go into some of their deep dives, you needed to pay additionally for that. The new way that they are doing their structured agreements has that all part of the contract. Now that we will be paying for it, we will be looking at their deep dives a lot more and seeing the stuff that they have done in the past.

It is the only automation tool that we're using. We are actually moving items from other automation tools that we have into this, so we have one central location where everything is automated. In the past, we have used some of our Microsoft Servers' scheduling tools and SQL Servers to automate the distribution of reports. Now, we are moving everything into one place so it's all controlled centrally. Then, you can look in one place to see where everything is. 

We have looked at a few different solutions in this past six months to see if they offer that same type of functionality and evaluated three other ones, which are very similar. I like ActiveBatch the best among the four solutions. The other tools seemed to not have the file manipulation tasks, and kept saying, "Well, you can do that in Doc." I thought, "That's okay. Welcome to the eighties." They basically said, "We don't have any filing manipulation tools built in because you can do that other ways." However, we're trying to put everything in one place. There is a lot of archiving of files that we do based on different criteria. For example, there was one job that we wrote which looks at the size of an Access database. When the size of the file gets too large, it notifies that team, saying, "You need to go delete data out of it." Those kinds of things were not available within other solutions.

I would recommend reaching out to a client who has used it, especially if you have questions. While talking with customer support is great, people who use it on the build have better knowledge of how to use it in the business area.

We haven't used any of the APIs directly through ActiveBatch yet. We have started playing around with having our own little outside website which allows our end users to trigger jobs directly within ActiveBatch. But, we have not fully implemented that yet.

We have started looking at cloud solutions for bringing Azure sites up and down. We have not implemented that yet.

I would rate this solution as a nine out of 10.

Initially, we were facing a lot of difficulties in monitoring the scheduled jobs. We had to create multiple tasks for managing servers and get it done by using change requests. It was very hectic and time-consuming as we had to monitor each and every server manually. 

After implementing ActiveBatch workload automation we were able to automate all our tasks and build reliable workflows. It provides an option of triggers to eliminate errors and automate triggers based on events/actions. Monitoring, scheduling, and controlling workflows of the jobs and tasks have been simplified in half the time.

We have to monitor our backup servers on a daily basis, creating dump files and verifying all the active master servers that have gotten at least one dump parsing data entry. It's helped with checking servers with error status and analyze/fix/report and monitoring for the latest dump files in the server. These were the most time-consuming tasks and required more attention. Active Batch has helped us to automate these tasks by reducing resource usage and giving us more time for extra productive hours other than monitoring. We are able to track down the server failures easily and fix the issue within the SLA targets thereby achieving effective and improved business processes.

ActiveBatch is highly reliable and scalable for all our automation work. The tool provides excellent service management and intelligent automation for scheduling complex jobs. 

It processes heavy workloads on servers hassle-free - proving the tool's stability. 

ActiveBatch provides summary reports and logs for further analysis and improvements in monitoring servers, which is very handy. With the help of ActiveBatch, we were able to reduce a lot of scripting work for automation tasks as the tool supports max scripting.

Overall, ActiveBatch is highly recommended if you are really struggling with daily monitoring tasks.

I don't see any drawbacks with the usability, however, the documentation part can be improved with some additional guidance about the features and their usage. I have faced struggles to understand, set up the tool, and implement it in my early days as a new user. 

The UI also could be a little more advanced in the next release along with some video tutorials - such as providing a user guide. 

I am using ActiveBatch for two years.

Customer support is good. We were able to get in touch with them when we had queries.

Positive

We did not use any software before; it was completely manual.

As a beginner, the setup was pretty hard due to a lack of deep guidance or documentation.

After automating, we are able to achieve our SLA targets thereby reducing the SLA breach and increasing the KPI by 98% - which is a great ROI.

Setting up the environment was quite hard initially. The pricing seemed to be pretty decent in the market for all our requirements. The licensing is easy as it can be chosen according to the plan that makes the most sense.

We evaluated other software, however, ActiveBatch seemed to be a perfect fit for our requirements.

Active Batch is my go-to option for all my automation-related work.

We have a security project where we need to perform daily scans on a number of our servers and network infrastructure components and keep a check on their health and status. We have implemented the ActiveBatch to perform endpoint security scans on our environment for each and every component and provide us with a detailed report stating their health as well as updating on that server and components that need upgrades. We have scheduled the scans to take place every 12 hours on a daily basis and provide the major stakeholder with detailed reports. 

ActiveBatch has really improved our project by automating the endpoint security scans on our servers and also other components of our environment. 

Being a security project we should have a complete picture of the health of each and every component as well as the servers that need to be upgraded to avoid any malware attacks on non-upgraded servers due to existing vulnerabilities. This has saved associates a number of critical business hours that can be used to concentrate on critical business tasks rather than spending them performing repetitive security scans.

The automation feature is a very valuable feature as the associates do not have to worry about performing repetitive tasks (i.e. endpoint security scans on a daily basis) that would take several hours to complete on a daily basis.

It is also faster and more efficient in conducting endpoint security scans compared to associates who perform it manually, reducing the scope of error and also providing a detailed report on each and every component present in our environment. The reports are very detailed and visually appealing that is shared with major stakeholders.

This product is the gold standard of all the automation tools around. You can schedule jobs easily. It is faster and also more efficient. The product also provides a detailed dashboard after the endpoint security scans are performed. 

The only service that needs improvement is integration support. There are very few documents that provide us with detailed information on the troubleshooting of errors that occur during integration with the existing environment. The team could create more documents and also publish blogs to support customers with queries. 

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

As a QA engineer, monitoring logs in the production environment was one tedious task. This was time-consuming and required lots of manual effort. However, using ActiveBatch Workload minimized the downtime and maximized productivity.

Job scheduling is another major advantage of this tool. At the time, there were nightly batch jobs like Trigger Service, User Service, Notifications Service, and many more, which were easily handled by ActiveBatch Workload and made our job simple and effortless. We currently have 25 jobs running on this platform with different environments.

There were more than 20 bots developed for the closure of tickets, and every bot has to be run on different environments. Using ActiveBatch has improved our job scheduling and reduced the manual effort of closing similar kinds of tickets. This way, operation costs are significantly reduced. Anyone can now run the bots and complete the automation work with zero knowledge.

We work with different time zones. This tool helped to schedule the jobs irrespective of a timeframe as this tool supports all time zones, and the jobs are scheduled accordingly.

We used to monitor the dashboard every hour to report in which task the orders failed, and huge task failures were to be immediately reported. 

Using this tool, if there are any huge failures, we immediately get an email notification, and the proper team will be informed, at which time they can act accordingly. It helped us to stop having to monitor the dashboard each and every hour. This helped us to avoid huge impacts on our business.

We also have integrated three different applications and are able to fetch information without any issues.

Setting up the software was hard. This could still be made easier. At times, the email alerts won’t work properly. There should be proper documentation for the email workflow.

The new version looks good, however, it has lots of lag and often crashes - unlike the older versions. 

Exporting the documents in .jpg format was a bit difficult.

Customer Service could be better.

It's been one year since I’ve been using ActiveBatch Workload Automation. It made my job easy by providing automation for job scheduling and monitoring.

As of now, the product looks stable, and it works well in all environments. This is a go-to product for all organizations.

Organizations with more than 1000-1500 employees can scale easily.

Customer service could be better as I have faced some issues at times.

Positive

I have used Selenium previously. However, job scheduling, monitoring dashboard, and email alert features were not there. This is the major reason why I switched to ActiveBatch.

The initial setup was complex as we wanted to set it up on different environments like Windows and Linux.

This was implemented through an in-house deployment, and I would rate the process eight out of ten. The level of expertise was high.

I have not been in touch with the financial team who would monitor ROI. This is unknown to me.

The pricing was high for organizational purposes, and the set-up cost was okay. 

I have used Selenium, and there were many drawbacks, so I switched to this application as it made my work easy and simple. 

I have no concerns about the application, as it has worked very well for me and my team. I recommend the solution to others. They could take advantage of this application by reducing their manual work.

We used the solution extensively in material planning, material transfer, SCM activities (such as outsourcing, purchasing, OEM reworks, production planning, manufacturing BOMs, work order closures, calculating and identifying SLE of material, scrap stores, customer and supplier tracks, finance, invoice billing, and securely managing data processing and data transfer). 

The main issue we encountered was that we users could not customize the software as needed as different organizations have different working cultures and different aerospace standards to maintain. Therefore, for any new improvements, we had to contact the service engineer and discuss the requirements. Except for this, the other functions were fantastic, with a little software training to understand the purpose of each function.

I'd like to share positive feedback on this, since the negative side is so minor. On the positive side, this tool is very much necessary for all manufacturing and production companies, and I strongly recommend it as the uses and functions of this tool are vast and can be used in almost all departments in the organization, including stores, business development, SCM, purchase, PPC, manufacturing, quality, finance, program management, and so on.

It has definitely improved my working culture by easily getting the job done.

The automation of ActiveBatch workloads is great. 

The user interface is exceptional; it is very secure and data leak-proof, which is very important to any organization. It is very useful in sending confidential files through FPP servers. 

There are no multiple login issues. You can easily identify who is accessing your login, if any. 

It aids in the great planning of our daily activities.

One more important feature is to get the summary report and presentations, which greatly helped in improving production work.

The product should be improved by providing a customization option. It would be very helpful in getting our own options as required.

The software can still be more user-friendly. By providing training, we could explore as many options as possible, and the mistakes could be more easily avoided.

Pricing can be minimized a bit.

Instead of having to upgrade each of the execution agents, there should be a mechanism in place where the agents are automatically updated when a new version is released.

Otherwise, it is very good software.

I've used the solution for over a year.

The stability is good.

I'd rate the scalability eight out of ten.

Customer support is pretty good. We have no concerns.

Positive

As the organization changes, we tend to use the most efficient software which is available. 

The initial setup was pretty straightforward, with no major difficulties encountered.

We handled the setup in-house.

The product is definitely worth the money.

The product is a bit costly.

I've also evaluated SAP HANA, ERP, and Oracle.

We have around 20 scheduled jobs we run every few hours. These include our price fetching jobs, market tracking jobs, subscription checking jobs, profit calculation jobs, etc. These are pretty long scripts with complex instructions to handle multiple data from a different database, microservice APIs, and many public market exchange APIs. All this data crunching was difficult to perform and maintain before ActiveBatch, however, once we started using ActiveBatch workload automation software, scheduling these jobs and tracking data crunching became easy. 

ActiveBatch has improved our organization by making job scheduling and API integrations very easy to use and to get started with. Earlier, we needed to assign these tasks to a high-paying highly-skilled resource. Now, we can train anyone to do the same job with very little effort. Our operation costs are significantly reduced because of ActiveBatch. Now, anyone can complete automation tasks without much knowledge of how computer API works and with no knowledge of coding. This has made our automation easier.

Some of the features we found useful for our use case are:

• Job scheduling. It has helped with scheduling complex jobs with simple scripts.
• API integration. It is very easy to set up regular Rest API calls and data gathering.
• Time Savings. Tracking multiple servers for downtime and multiple jobs logs is very time-consuming. We have to switch between multiple tabs and applications for all this. However, ActiveBatch made it very easy to track the downtime of our own services and logs of our cron jobs very easily. 

Overall, we found these valuable

Some improvements can be made to the user interface. I personally love to see ActiveBatch keep up with current trends in UI development. 

Also, some improvements can definitely can be made to make ActiveBatch more beginner friendly.

The custom theme could be a new feature suggestion for ActiveBatch.

Apart from these, I don't have any suggestions for ActiveBatch. They did a pretty good job of giving the best state-of-the-art features. All of these features are very well thought out and very useful

I've used the solution for two years.

The stability is great.

The scalability is great. We are onboarding new users, and our number of jobs is growing. We have not faced any problems.

Technical support offers great support with a fast response time.

Positive

ActiveBatch is the first software of this nature that I have used. 

The initial setup is straightforward.

We handled the implementation with an in-house team.

ActiveBatch gave us a good ROI in our organization.

The features provided in ActiveBatch are worth buying, and the cost makes sense for the number of features provided.

We did some research on VMware and IBM Workload Automation.