Automic Automation Reviews

We use it for simple job scheduling, mainly for SAP. Two to three parts are for SAP, job scheduling, and smaller and larger workflows. It performs well.

Our customers appreciate it mostly because it takes a lot of effort away from them. You can trust the system. If the system works well, the customers are satisfied. 

Most of our issues are related to the system, not the job scheduling, such as, bugs and unexpected downtime of the application or database.

Content of file transfers cannot be searched by the system, but has to be done by the user interface. This is not good, as it has been erased often.

One of the previous bug fix issues created new bugs, which was not good. 

The main part of it is stable, though.

It is scalable. We can grow it out.

We use the technical support often. 

Our recent experience with technical support has not been good, because it took a couple of months to get feedback. Traces and reports were sent, but were not analyzed for at least two months before providing feedback, and they did not give the right traces. This took two months to find out, so that was not too good.

Our primary use case is the SAP area, but we do provide Workload Automation services for other applications as well.

The solution is integrated across all applications and platforms in our company. We can provide everything from the very first data source to the data target in one immense code.  With the automation, we are able to provide background services. It is very economical and not possible to do manually. 

It is part of our IT service. Without this solution, we are not competitive.

The most valuable feature is the combination of normal job management with file transfer and scripting, so we have everything onboard.

I would like to see the following in future releases:

• Workload Automation in a cloud
• Solutions for the smaller applications.

It runs stably. However, after a version upgrade, the stability should be better.

There are too many bugs to be solved after a version upgrade. We are working on the limits of an architecture with 16,000 platforms. It is impossible to test everything out in the software lab of CA. I wish it would be improved.

The scalability in the SAP area is very good. We are able to provide hundreds of different services and system incidences. 

I see a huge possibility in cloud solutions. We are looking to offer future services out of the cloud.

We have had good experiences using their technical support.

I have offered other companies to come view the solution at our company and see how it works. Most companies have been happy to do.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

1. Functionality
2. Solution needs to be economic.

We have different applications. We can schedule our pickup or applications (mainly MFT for financial services) and provide file transfers only to customers. 

Automation helps us. It makes our lives easier. Anything that can be automated is automated.

Stability. It works without issues.

The web interface needs improvement.

Compared to other products, the stability is remarkable.

We do not use some of the special features. We use a very plain level of it: just starts and stops, calendar functions, schedules, and events. We have no add-ons on top of them. 

We have had no problems with the scalability so far.

It is a bit of a problem, because they like to do email ping-pong via their web page. Sometimes, it would be much easier if someone would call you on the phone. For example, it takes three or four days to obtain the same answer that you can receive with a phone call within a few minutes.

I was not involved with the initial setup.

I would recommend Automic, because it is easy to set up and use. The whole system is complete. I have not had any issues with usage.

It is completely sufficient. We are still on version 10. We are upgrading to version 12, because we have to do it. However, we do not believe there is any missing functionality at the moment.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Support
• Price
• Functionality.

I do not care about the name of the vendor.

We primarily use it for job scheduling and business automation.

It is the automation. Saving time and money is the key. We automate everything. 

We are able to use notifications for escalation, so if there is a problem, we can find out about it quickly.

The workflow allows us to integrate multiple applications into one flow and come up with a business result.

The one big issue that we have is around passwords and not being able to update passwords through a different tool. This is not available yet. It is packed in there with 12.2 and the login objects, but not with the connection object, which is a big thing for us to allow us same password updates without having to manually update them.

We have had no big production issues in the five years that we have had this product. So, it is really stable.

It is scalable. Though, it costs to scale. While, it is scalable, the add-ons are expensive.

Technical support has been good. Though sometimes it varies from time to time, where it transitions from good to bad. We have not had to use them so much recently, because we almost know enough about the product at this stage to support it ourselves. For the critical issues they are very good, but for the the lower priority stuff over the phone it is a bit difficult to engage them sometimes.

We were replacing AutoSys. We saw Automic as a better version of it, which it definitely has been. We replaced that an existing solution because it was no longer fit for its purpose.

It was straightforward. We made it difficult on ourselves at the time. We have recently changed and made it simpler. As regards to a mixed environment, it was fine.

We have seen big improvements in automation and automated tasks allowing our people to work on more important things for the company, as well as getting financial data quicker. It also provides us time savings from a company point of view.

There were a couple other vendors.

I would definitely recommend the product.

We are using mainly Workload Automation for all types of jobs over different servers and operating systems.

Without automation, it would be nearly impossible to do all the jobs that we are doing.

It is flexible. We can do additional scripting in Automic script, in combination with JSL language.

Documentation is not great. It was previously much better.

I would like to see features from "Prompt" sets in read Masks.

At the moment, we are using 2.0. The job automation is okay. The main functions are stable. There are bugs though.

It is scalable.

We used just shell scripts and crontab.

The initial setup was straightforward.

In some of our departments, it has had a great impact on efficiency, costs, and resources.

I would recommend Workload Automation.

We have many use cases for automating different systems. In most cases, we use it to automate database application servers. We have over 2000 servers, so we need to synchronize jobs on various platforms, which is our most common use case.

So far, the performance has been okay.

Our environment is more stable. We have less downtime and some of our operations are much faster than they were before. We have seen a positive impact on efficiency. Tasks that used to take people one or two hours are now done in minutes.

In terms of whether using Automic has enabled our company to grow, it is possible. However, I have not been made aware of any examples.

The most valuable feature is that I do not have to wait for one job to finish, then manually click on the next one to start. Automation is the best feature.

My biggest complaint is that there is no list price. We work with Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, etc., and all of them have list pricing. Automic, right up until today, has never had list pricing. This makes things difficult, because we need to plan budgets for the next year and can't. The lack of list pricing is my number one complaint because it is very difficult to plan anything.

We have some systems where, every time we lose the network connection, the software, after five or 10 minutes, is inoperable. With Automic, we monitor what is happening, and if network connectivity is down, Automic deletes all the logs that caused the system to crash. Before Automic, we needed to handle these situations manually. Now, every time that logs crowd the system, Automic deletes them and solves the problem.

That means we do not have this type of downtime anymore. It is system crucial for us.

Scalability is fine. We have a cluster and two active-active nodes, so it is very easy to scale.

We used technical support in the beginning. The experience was very good. They were easy to reach and know their business. They helped us a lot during that time.

This is our first job management solution. My managers made the decision to buy it.

The important criteria when selecting a vendor to work with are

• Good support
• A good product.

Good support is very important for us.

The initial setup was straightforward. The installation took two days. We did not have any difficulties. You just click, click, and click.

As an engineer, I do not have access to this information regarding ROI.

The cost of arrays is high. If you want to buy an array for an application, and see value from it, you need about half a million dollars. That is too expensive.

Read the documentation.

We use it to schedule our production workload.

We scheduled our database maintenance jobs through ASP and when we did this, we scheduled them in a certain defined way that we expected them to run. And when that was initially set up, there was no consideration for a database not being available so if the jobs tried to run when a database wasn't available, obviously they wouldn't work and an operator would have to intervene.

The plan was that people would open requests to have jobs held at that time. When there were only one or two databases, that wasn't hard to maintain and people did it. When we grew to many, it became harder to do that. Then with the change in how we're doing stuff, everything happens more, servers get booted more, more changes.

We use features of the product that allow us to determine if the database is available and to only allow the jobs to run when the database is available. So that saves a lot of manpower in the one group that was opening requests to hold jobs, and in the other group which had to implement the request to hold the jobs. It eliminated all that and provided a more dynamic environment for when these jobs can run, without operator intervention. 

That is something we started about two years ago. We fully implemented it last year and we've noticed a big savings in manpower.

It's easy to use. When you schedule jobs, if you can speak English you can schedule them easily and correctly.

There's a lot of flexibility because the product allows you to do many tasks, in multiple ways, so you can choose the way that works best for your environment.

How they handle cross datacenter failover, because they have a really good High Availability solution that works well within a single sysplex, but in our environment, since we have two main datacenter locations, we have two separate sysplex. And, while when everything is working ASP can control jobs both here and in the other location, the current product does not support High Availability across datacenters. That is something we would like to see the product have.

Currently, what we have is we have a homegrown solution, because we're required to have that kind of resiliency, because it's our enterprise job scheduler.

When everything's working, we're invisible. When it's not working: "Why aren't you working?"

Stability is a 10 out of 10.

Scalability is a 10 out of 10.

Tech support is a 10 out of 10.

When I started, we were already on this product, but I do know that they were using a competing product before and they felt that this product had more of what they wanted. So they converted from the competing product to this product.

When the company chose this product, it was actually pre-CA, and then CA acquired the product. But for the most part, they've kept it what it was. While it has a new owner, it's still the same product.

I believe it's pretty straightforward. It's a complex thing by nature so it's not going to be super simple, but it's not like you can't do it either.

I believe experience helps. And in our case, we had a lot of help from the vendor, so while we, per se, didn't have the experience, there were people helping to get us going that did have the experience. So maybe I'm underestimating how much that was important, because it was available, even though it wasn't coming from me or one of my team members, but somebody else was providing it.

I'm really the technical guy. Pricing is not something that I deal with so I can't answer that question.

That would have been 20 years ago, so the market is a little different than it was back then. There are solutions today that did not exist back then. Pretty much all of the big players still exist today. But we're definitely in a different place today than we were back then.

No advice other than the normal stuff that you would do when looking at any product: Does it fit what you need? 

I would recommend doing a proof of concept before signing any contract. Everybody's stuff sounds good on paper and everybody's stuff can do everything, but what happens when you bring it in your environment? Does it do what you need it to do? Those are the most important things. The other stuff, while it's nice stuff, if you can't do what the product is required to do, then there's no value to the product.

For us, it gives us what we need so it's a good value. Forget about the price, because if the product doesn't do what you want, it doesn't matter what the price is.

I would rate the product a 10 out of 10. We use the product everyday and it works and, for the most part, every time we have a problem, it seems it's never my product's problem. It's: I have a problem because there's a problem on the system, so guess what? We're not going to be working. I need a stable system to run. 

Or if it is our problem, maybe we didn't do something we were supposed when we found out that we were supposed to do this, and we reconfigure something and then we move forward and we don't have that problem any more. Or we re-architect how we do stuff, because we've had to make tweaks of stuff as we've gone along. We would do stuff and it would work and then we would do something a little differently, and what we did, it didn't work and we'd have to figure out what the problem is and fix it.

Again, the flexibility of the product allows us to do things multiple ways. We might have started doing it one way and that worked for a while and then either something changed -whether we had more volume or we did something a little differently or we had different issues - and then we would address them with different tweaks, solutions.

The abstraction - I call it the "who, what, and where" of pieces of work that need to be done in the IT world. The who: the log-in, the credentials, all those things. The where: as far as the agents and those things. Then the what: the actual worker objects themselves. Having those abstracted and separated allows us to move things from one environment to the next, and it allows consistency and testing. We can abstract those three different layers. To me, that's one of the biggest advantages of the tool.

How technology agnostic it is. It works with all the different legacy solutions we have and it allows us to look at things in one location, as opposed to going to a lot of different places.

• More Hadoop native support for things such as Oozie jobs, Spark jobs.
• Native support for messaging architecture like with your RabbitMQ, your Kafkas. 

More native support for - we talk about the software factory with services and that new architecture - more native support for interacting with those things.

Very stable. The tool we had before this tool, we were nervous around patching cycles, and we were nervous for datacenter downtime because we didn't how that tool was going to react. But this tool, far better than the tool we had before and we probably don't even really have to think about the stability. It's sort of like a good piece of software is like a good referee. If it's doing good, you don't notice it. That's the good thing about Automic. We don't even notice that it's there a lot of the time. It's a very, very stable product.

Very scalable. I know they just talked about adding support for hundreds of thousands of agents, and I know it goes up to like a thousand clients per engine, so you can do a lot with that. It's a very scalable solution. We have a lot more capacity probably than we have use cases for it right now.

Technical support has been good. With any type of support structure, you're going to have challenges with geographies and things getting passed off, but generally Automic has been very supportive. Their Professional Services department: excellent, A1. And they really give you that "partner" feel, as opposed to the customer-vendor. We still have that relationship, but when there are actual issues, it feels more like a partner situation as opposed to a "You're the vendor, I'm the customer."

I give it an eight out of 10. The functionality is great, the scripting language is very powerful. They can adapt to most use cases. Very good community of different companies and a user base so when we have problems we can go to other people.

Why it didn't get a 10, there are too many windows. If you're getting deep into some of these workflows, you may have 20 different windows open and, if you didn't already have that deep understanding of how enterprise orchestration works, it would be very overwhelming to get up to speed on something like that. 

It needs some type of way - and I don't even know what that looks like, but I know when it doesn't feel good - to minimize the amount of windows and get it to where you could have all the information you need available on the screen; or more dynamic so you don't have this clutter on your screen.