Automic Workload Automation Reviews

One key point for our selling is our business's dashboarding. It was something very important and we used it at the beginning very much. 

It is an easy product to use, and we can use it for end-to-end process automation. We also have the capabilities to do dashboarding, therefore we have an analytics product that can provide other things and value for us.

We would like to see more dashboarding into the product, maybe an embedded Java API which we would be able to load on our own objects into the system. We were writing them on our own, but we would like this standardized.

The system is a stable product overall. We did something maybe a little bit wrong at the beginning, so we had a little bit of an unstable product. Since we have merged to version 12, it has become a stable system.

It is a very scalable product, not only for Workload Automation, but also for the other products provided by Automic or CA Automic. You can use the baseline, the automation engine, and scale up what you need.

Technical support is excellent from our past experiences with Automic. At the moment, we are facing a few issues with the merge of CA and Automic. We hope these will be resolved soon.

Our old solution was not able to deliver a real end-to-end automation. It was embedded in SAP. An excellent product for SAP so far, but it is not able to be scalable for the end-to-end. 

This was the reason why we did research at our company to do an end-to-end product assessment. In the end, the decision was to made to go with Automic.

During our PoC, I was the guy who was implementing and installing the product. I thought with the help of a consultant that it was an easy installation. 

On the shortlist, when we purchased the product, we had CA, Stonebranch, BMC Control-M, Automic, and our current vendor in mind. A few of them were kicked out during the first session because they were not able to deliver everything. In the end, we had BMC and Automic.

I would like to rate it as an eight out of 10, because there is room for improvement, and I would like to see this from Automic. They should continue to work on the product to improve the product.

If my peers are looking for a real end-to-end solution, not only some siloed solution, they should go for Automic because it is an easy product to use. It is easy to install. I can recommend this product to other customers.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: The partnership between a vendor and customer is very important. You should have a good account manager in place who is dealing with the customer. This is something very important for us. Customer service and support are also important. 

The primary use case is to automate jobs which run at night on SAP, Unix jobs, and Windows. It has performed well.

It has improved the way my organization functions, in terms of efficiency, time, and costs.

The night processing helps to have data just-in-time for the morning. It is also very important to have the possibility to create incidents or emails if there is a problem, so operations can investigate and do something.

At the moment, we are only using the workload automation and the job scheduling. I think there are more possibilities to automate and connect them to the whole business process.

The most valuable feature is it always runs things automatically that you normally have to do manually, like download files. We also use the FTP agent, where you have to download and upload files at a specific date.

The only thing that we would like improved is the FTP agent. It only supports SOCKS proxy, and we would like it to also support an HTTP proxy.

We would like the feature to implement the privileged access management. However, we have heard that it is already supported.

It is very stable.

Technical support is very good.

We had a previous solution. It was Control-M. We switched because there were some issues around the costs. Automic's costs were lower.

We had some consultants when we started with it. They gave us an introduction and training. We also have training every year at CA Automic in Nürnberg.

We did not evaluate anyone else for job scheduling.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Support
• It is a fast solution.
• The product minimizes downtime.
• Good reputation.

We use the CA Automic solution for our complete business batch. We have several use cases, depending on the subcompany. We have an ABS system with a great batch and the lean system, therefore we have three different main batches with approximately 900,000 objects in the CA system. 

We have mostly connected our complete systems on the web front-end for the customer, so they can choose their products, manage their contracts, and get a new contract. This is all put into the automation system and handled there until, at the end, we have the output for printing, then we send it back to the customer.

We are on the user side of CA, not system engineers. We control the different batches, and this way is better for handling the systems than the way that we did it before. I like the script engine of CA, where you can build everything you want. If there are features not implemented, then you can script something around it, and it works.

• The search is sometimes a little bit slow.
• The calculation of the calendars needs improvement, as I have problems from time to time.
• I am excited about the new web GUI from the B12. However, I am not sure about it, except for the main client that we had before needs improvement.

The system is very stable. I have very impressed with it. Also, it all depends on if it is Linux and Oracle or Windows and SQL. We have both in our company, and both are very stable.

We have a large batch with many objects in the CA system. Therefore, we are always at the upper end of the performance that the product can handle.

The search is sometimes very slow. I have heard in the B12 version that there is a new solution for this issue, but I don't know if it is usable because they duplicate the database and then you can search there, not the online database. We just moved to the B12 version, so we will see how it work. The rest of the performance is okay.

From what I hear, it's good support. They always try to support us in the best way. 

Last year, when moving from B8 to B10, they have changed several features. One of our highly used features was no longer available. While it had a similar name, it was a completely different function. After calling the support and checking with them, they implemented the old feature for us again on the newer version.

About 15 years ago, we had CA-7 from CA. Then, we changed to the UC4 Automic. Now, we are back to CA.

Before we have our main releases, we always check between other products for the batch. In the last few years, it has always been Automic which was best for our needs.

I have seen all different types of scheduling systems. It is the best for my company to handle.

It has an easy to handle GUI. Because of the script engine, you can do nearly everything you want. I prefer it to other solutions. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: It has to handle our batches, because we use many objects. It is good how we can migrate from the new tool and how much work is accepted for the migration. At the moment, we have not found anything better than the CA solution.

Our primary use case would just be our production batch processing.

It's been great. We've had a few bumps in years past but it's been rock solid since the last couple versions.  We also perform all internal file transfers and many of our company's external file transfers.

We have a lot of jobs that have to run, and it's easy to see what the status is.

We've been using it for around 15 years now. We're very comfortable with it, that's probably the biggest thing. I've been using it for a long time, so the comfort level is there. I don't see any reason I would want to switch to anything else. It does everything we need. Actually, we're not even utilizing it to its fullest ability. We're probably a couple versions behind what the latest version is. And there are a lot of features we want to get to, to start utilizing, but it all takes time and does require the correct resources available.

The usability of the user interface.  It just makes sense and it is easy to see the flow of the processes.  We have been slowly migrating to the web-based user interface, which has some of the older features missing, but also introduces additional new features.

In terms of additional features, it's probably stuff they already have available that we haven't started utilizing yet. 

I really like the idea of the Zero Downtime Upgrade, but really excited to be able to use the centralized agent upgrade. That's probably one of our biggest pain points right now. When we go to a new version, the agents have to all be upgraded. We have several thousand agents and that's a painful process because it's slow and time-consuming to upgrade. Now they have the ability to automate it, we're working on getting to that point.  The analytics that are available show great potential.

Stability has been great. My team, we call ourselves "the invisibles" because things run so well that sometimes you almost feel like you have to try to break something to actually get acknowledged.

In terms of scalability, it's been able to do everything we want and we're probably using one percent of the resources, day to day. We'll have up to 100 people logged into the system and it just runs. It still gets good response.

We've used technical support on occasion. Every once in a while you run into something that you're unsure about or not sure how to utilize it. I've been happy with the support we've received. It's definitely improved, like I said, over the years. It's been great. The response has been much quicker.

For the open system side, I don't believe we were using anything previously. Probably anything that they would have been using would have been Microsoft Task Scheduler or a Unix cron. But we were not using anything that I know of at the time. We did have CA-7 on the mainframe, which we still actually use on a limited basis, but that is being sunsetted. So we were not using anything really.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup. I actually used it from an operator's standpoint. I did not start maintaining the system until about a year and a half after we brought this system in.

It was implemented prior to my time of working with the application.

I am unsure as it was before I started administering the application.

When our company is investing in a new vendor, our top criteria are 

• support
• features
• stability is probably the biggest.

I don't have a whole lot of experience with other automation systems, other than CA-7, which we're on a very old version of, but I really like the Automic Workload Automation due to its ease of use.

We use it for multiple system automation and file transfers to secure POS networks.

The speed in which data is collected form all POS terminals has changed the way our industry has started analyzing how to schedule showtimes, drive advertisements, and change concession pricing. IT is no longer a quarterly process but something that the business can change within 24 hours.

The ability the system has to dynamically create groups, schedules, and workflows is crucial to AMC. In a fast-paced, agile environment, the teams at AMC are very lean. Monitoring and maintaining of all the approximately 2,000,000 executions of Automic jobs are managed by only three employees. The system has been designed to be as dynamic and versatile as the business processes and teams that own them.

The direction in which the UI is going is concerning to me. It does not offer the security context we would need to implement future versions. While I see benefit in the Web UI, the security it would lack in separating a user's experience from an administrator's experience is an issue for us. MFA functionality is required since we're dealing with connectivity to the POS and for PCI/SOX compliance.

Another area for improvement would be SQL performance. While tracing SQL traffic, we noticed a lot of commands that cause contention/locks as well as forced waits. The efficiency of the SQL could be greatly improved (in some cases by simply replacing nested Selects and using NOLOCK hints).

Finally, re-evaluating the security model that the ECC uses would be very beneficial. While granularity is very powerful, some intelligence around it is the only way it is manageable. I should be able to grant a user access to execute a job without having to directly list every include, prompt set, output scan, script, login, etc. An inherited read for execution purposes would accomplish the same results without making the admin list every single object every time, as well as deny the user the ability to edit.

There have been some issues with performance when there is slowness with database resources. We have also discovered issues with some objects if file size/count is high. I believe a patch has been created for that though.

We do not have any scalability issues.

Technical support is amazing. They always follow through and are extremely personable. They help as much as they can, and have no problem asking others on their team for help to make sure the right answer is given.

We did not have a previous solution.

The initial setup was very straightforward. The consulting team for implementation was great to work with and taught us the system very well.

The team at Automic are great with understanding your needs as a business. They are always willing to go the extra mile to make sure the solution works for you. This is not only something they do in their software but also in their licensing.

We looked at BMC, Tidal Software, ORSYP, and ActiveBatch.

I would advise anyone purchasing this product to do the architecture work ahead of implementation. While it is easy to move objects between non-prod and prod or other environments, if you put the work up-front into designing how to move things or manage outages, etc., it makes your world a lot easier.

We have many systems, like SAP, Linux, and Windows systems. We use it for crossover and production, beginning from Host to SAP to Windows, to make a print page for all our users and customers. It is not possible do our jobs without automation software. Automic is a great help to us.

We have been using automation since 2003 (version 263.G). Today, we are at version 10 and looking to upgrade. However, we do not what version will to upgrade to due to our hardware requirements. We must check if what we have is okay, or if we must buy some more servers, laptops, and screens. Therefore, we are checking out versions 11 and 12, or we deciding if we should wait for 12.2. We are seeing what other are doing and determining what the problems for a migration might be.

The main things that we use it for are job control and batch. For these, it does very well.

We not use all features nor all the add-ons.

Version 10 is stable. New software never comes out without some problems. That is the problem when you go with new. Therefore, we are waiting a little bit, since it is very important that the software is stable. In the near future, we must have a stable software that we can do our job yesterday, today, and tomorrow. This is the most important thing; you must trust the software. 

When you look at other technical support hotlines, the Automic team is very good.

The hotline can take a long time. They will say, "I will take it and give it to the Level 2 support." That is okay. We do the same thing in our company, like a front office cleaning calls. I still do not like it. It means more team more time waiting for a good technical answer and solution. That is a problem. Unfortunately, we can't request having 20 technical support teams dedicated our business. 

We have using Automic for long time. From the first step, you need to have time to install it. When you want to use the entirety of Automic, it is heavy. In the beginning, our administration chief told us to use 10 percent of your time for Automic administration. Now, we are using 100 percent (our entire job); it is a full-time job.

Our systems are not that big. When we have trouble or have updates, it is a full-time job. We must talk with other teams. We must see that the hotfixes are updated. This cannot be done in ten minutes as some modules and add-ons come together, and we must see how to orchestrate it within our company. We must look at these things, which are part of the company, see how they can be used. We spend a lot of time of this.

We use it to automate our business processes. It is just for automation and scheduling.

We have worked about 20 years with this product. We have migrated for 20 years from CA to Automic. It is very interesting. Now, we are back to CA, because they have taken over the Automic company. The benefits also include the automation of our processes. We have worked mostly with SAP software, and we have other things in our plans. We want to automate the distribution of servers, so clients can make a request from ServiceNow. That way, companies can order servers on the internet that we normally we would build during the process for internal use. Because developers sometimes need a very fast machine for testing, you can click in ServiceNow to request a machine after two hours, then you can have a machine to plug into. At the moment, we have tried to make this a digitalized process, although we have a problem with ServiceNow.

It is easy to integrate different systems in one platform, then to automate it. You have a job, then one part of the job is going to the SAP system, and the other one is going to ServiceNow or to another system. Then, they all combine into one process.

The very special feature that we use is the connection to ServiceNow.

It does not have the same functions as the old version, which makes our developers angry because because they must work with this tool. We going forward it may not be possible.

CA has missed the product's focus. We have a lot of developers in our company, and we are experiencing the same problem. However, the CA company has not seen that developers and clients are having a problem, which is not good for the product that we do. CA took over the Automic company last year, and we do not think this was a good direction for the product.

I would like to see the rich client with the product for the developers.

It is more important for us to have a longer, stabler releases. We do not need so many features. This is a problem of bigger companies where the management wants new features, but the product has no stability after that.

It would be good to have a mobile app, where you can monitor your process, just to see if it is running or if it is blocked. The user interface on the web is not good for the developers. Features are missing, and for the client, it is too complex. At the moment, we build our own UI. We have programmers in Java API, and we have a Client which works on the mobile phone. It can start jobs, make the schedules stop and start, and see the statistics on a smartphone.

We have had issues with the performance. We have a job now in production, but the product is not very stable. ServiceNow creates problems with the Automic entry of the connector, so the stability could be a little bit better with this product.

Sometimes, we have some performance problems. I am not sure it is because of the software. It might be because we have a huge amount of objects in our system. In this case, it can happen that we often have performance problems. I am not sure if it is because of the product, it is more because of the objects in our system.

Because the product is based on the SQL Database, we have too many activations. The scalability is limited by the SQL in the background, and that is a problem. If you want to take jobs to other systems, you must build the developer our way. At the moment, we are building a new system. We have it for every country and have separated it for machines. It is mostly getting better, but the scalability to build it on new systems or to split it is not so easy.

We have technical support. We also have a connection in Austria with the support colleagues there. 

The first step: You must describe the problem. At the most, filling in a checklist.

Then: It helps to take the telephone, and talk to a technical engineer directly. 

That is why their technical support is very good.

Mostly, we contact support because our problems are very complex. Normally, we find problems that they have never knew about before. We have new technology and build actions on the automation system, then we find objects which can work with those actions, because we have technical limitations. 

We have a contact within the support, and also with a freelance in Austria. We have worked together with several people to find a solution for this new philosophy. Automic states you should build everything with actions and take multiple actions with business processes. However, not all objects are usable for actions that we see.

If you would have to start all your jobs manually, it would cost you a lot of time and money.

You do not need any humans to start jobs, so you can save a lot of money.

From the bad products, the Automic is the best. All products in the market are not good since they are simple workload scheduling. There are some things are missing in the Automic product, which our management does not see.

I would recommend using Automic.

The visibility into what normally a monolithic script would do with the audit trail and version control features makes troubleshooting jobs a breeze. I use to have to manually code in logging tricks into my scripts, then parse though these file to see what was happening during execution. With AWA, I simply view the last run, or any previous run, and can visually see what happened with the ability to drill down to a specific part of the workflow. Viewing past modifications to objects would require a third party version management product with a check-out/check-in process; with Automic, every save is shown in a tab on the object.

The main improvement is the time it saves in troubleshooting an issue. The common phrase, “There is a script somewhere that does that”, is no longer heard. A single pane of glass view and visual representation of workflows exponentially reduces time to recovery.

The direction of the product and the way that they add visibility into a script are amazing, but there are limitations in self administration automation and stability issues.

There are two main areas which I think the product needs to improve on:

1. Improving automated administration of the product itself. As an administrator, it is easy for me to manage another product using Automic, but when I want to manage the product itself, I’m forced to writing Java console apps using their API to do things. There are community provided solutions to help, but they are not tested enough to be considered production safe.
2. The stability of the product. It is very easy to take down the system. Even with HA infrastructure underneath, we still have constant outages.

Personally, I’ve use this product for 18 months. The organization has used it almost 5 years.

Yes, as mentioned before, we are constantly having issues due to bugs or things that should work, but don’t. In a high demand, time critical environment, it is not viewed as a reliable product requiring use of external means to continue when there is an outage.

No, it is extremely easy to scale up or down. Adding an Agent or an Automation Engine is simply connecting or removing it. Adding new workflows and tasks require no redesign inside the application.

To be honest, I have had to come up with the majority of the fixes to my issues, and the times that I couldn’t were known bugs. We are a company where an hour or two outages majorly impact us and their support SLAs do not come close to ours.

The company previously used AutoSys. To my understanding, they switched for cost reasons.

I was told that it took over six months and was difficult.

I don’t have much to do with this, but I’ve been told it is cheaper than the competition.

I wasn’t around for this.

Setting up a new installation is straightforward and easy. It is well documented on their site.