In our case, it's just managing the day and night jobs of banks because we are supporting several banks in Europe.
The company I'm working for is an outsourcing company who provides solutions for customers. We host their complete environment.
Download the AutoSys Workload Automation Buyer's Guide including reviews and more. Updated: July 2022
CA Workload Automation is an enterprise scheduling solution for the automation of IT processes in a heterogeneous environment. It automates and delivers millions of mission-essential services across thousands of companies worldwide. With the CA team and expert community, you get so much more than software. Work with us to get to mission-accomplished—every second of your business.
AutoSys Workload Automation was previously known as CA Workload Automation, CA Workload Automation AE .
Gaumont, Mercantil do Brasil, CCEE, Hanwha Life
"The pricing needs to be improved. Some of my client's complained that it was too expensive."
In our case, it's just managing the day and night jobs of banks because we are supporting several banks in Europe.
The company I'm working for is an outsourcing company who provides solutions for customers. We host their complete environment.
The features that I have found most valuable with AutoSys are that it is scalable, easy to use, fast, and always available. That's very important because if it's not steady then it's a real problem. So, at this point, we are satisfied with it.
If you do not need the latest features like cloud and compare, I would really advise using AutoSys. For future technologies, I cannot answer the question yet.
In terms of what should be in the next release, I want integration and AI and so on. I'd like easy reporting where you can compare information, for example, "that job normally takes three minutes and last time it took six minutes or 10 minutes." Then you can get the information to the engineer of which job is taking more time than normal - understanding strange behavior compared to the baseline.
I have been using AutoSys Workload Automation for nine years.
We are not using the latest version. We are planning a migration towards the latest version or a migration to another tool. Most likely, because of the lifetime of the environment that has to be supported, we will probably migrate to the latest version because it's often easier if you stay with the same product.
We have several customers at this moment and AutoSys is used by one bank. In fact, it's not like real end-users are touching the tool. It is doing its job during the night and it is only for one application including the bank application, so it's not connected to its final end users, so you scale all the toolings which are available in the bank environment. We only focus on the core banking.
The technical support is very good. If you open a case, the support is really sufficient.
AutoSys Workload Automation is really easy to install. You can install the server and an agent in about 10 minutes. It takes the agent on five clicks. Even if you have many agents to install during installation, you can pick that very easily and you also can deploy it fairly easily. In terms of the deployment, it's a nice solution.
Normally you can do it by yourself unless you're running into situations where the newest version is working slightly differently than the previous version. Sometimes you need to adopt some parameters, but they provide you sufficient support for that. The deployment can be done by one guy. One system engineer can handle the job.
AutoSys Workload Automation has a yearly subscription.
On a scale of one to ten, for the part that we are currently using, I can give AutoSys Workload Automation an eight.
I would recommend this product for other users who want to start using it depending on their needs. I'm still investigating what the new version provides in the future, based on technology, so it is difficult to answer that question.
We use it to run different jobs across different servers.
The initial setup is easy.
It's a stable product.
The solution can scale.
There should be easier migrations from a different bus scheduler. Prior to this workload, we were using BMC control M and the migration was really hard. We had to manually create the jobs and there was no sort of automation for the migration. Workload Automation could improve the handling of file transfer jobs. Compared to control M, control M allows multiple file transfers. It can have five types of files that can be transferred. They have different file formats or different sizes. You can configure it in control M. Here, you only have one and three for file transfer. A lot of times you also encounter issues with SSL crypto in conflict on certain jobs. Basically, the newer servers have newer security measures and currently, the product is not compatible with them.
I've used the solution for seven years.
The solution is stable. there are no bugs or glitches. It does not crash or freeze. It's reliable.
We had a few issues, however, the issues were more on the infrastructure rather than with the application itself.
We have 60 people using the solution.
It's scalable. It can expand as needed.
We've used technical support. We find them very helpful and responsive and are satisfied with the level of service we get.
Positive
I find it simple to set up. However, the fear really is understanding how Workload Automation handles jobs as compared to control M. They have similarities, however, they handle schedules and jobs differently.
At the moment, we have a team of two or three handling the support for the product.
We handled the implementation ourselves, although we did request an overview of the installation and setup process.
If you looked at the client price, I'd rate the cost five out of five.I heard from recent talks with support that they removed the licensing scheme that we had before. Maybe the rating would be lower now. Before they had this unlimited installation of agents across and service. They've since removed that scheme.
We did not evaluate other solutions. It was the client's position to use this product as they were offered a good deal. At that time, we were using control M and I was initially hesitant due to the challenges I saw in terms of how the product handles the jobs. The client already decided on the solution and we just had to learn to love it.
We're using the solution at the request of a client.
I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.
A strong aspect of our current use case is to provide integration with the Zeke mainframe scheduler and enable cross platform job dependencies between the two worlds.
Self-Service can enable the support team to move from being a bottleneck to being the go-to team for expertise and advice and to focus on maintaining the infrastructure.
Granular Security enables self-service role-based access. JIL language is always a big accelerator for creating/editing job flows efficiently.
Great at handling timezones and daylight savings adjustments.
Despite the commitment of the development team to improve the UI since version 11.3, the WCC module still lacks true quality. There are still too many screens and the use cases need to be handled in a more "compact" way. I have not seen the v12 product yet.
Note that this product is now a legacy product with a dwindling user base and support.
Do not consider for a green site implementation
We've been using v11.3.6 for years, and the tool in general since 2006.
We've had no issues with the stability.
We've had no trouble scaling it for our needs.
Customer Service:
The user conference used to be a great way to catch the attention of the development and product management team. Sadly, these are a thing of the past.
Technical Support:
Technical support has noticeably gone down since the Broadcom takeover of CA. A lot of the knowledge base is now on line and the expectation is that users self-support with that. The level of depth that the support organisation provides is not as deep as previously. We have not experienced any emergency situations though, so can't comment on that.
The initial setup was not hugely complicated, but do set aside four to six man-months if you are not using specialist services. The product does require some careful thinking around the High Availability and security sides. Thorough qualifications testing is recommended for a scheduler, too.
If you don't buy competence, you will need to build it internally which takes time. The recent versions of the product are a lot more complex than the relatively simple 4.0.
Legacy product with dwindling user base and support.
Get some specialist help if you don't have internal knowledge.
This product is now legacy.
It is being used for all the ETL processing and batch processing that we have in the enterprise. It is being used for automated file processing. We get the file from the mainframe.
It gives a real-time view of all the batch processing that we have. Monitoring-wise, it is really good.
It also gives us the ability to connect different software processes.
I am not sure whether it is our limitation or a tool limitation because we haven't yet explored it, but whenever we look for different types of reporting, we have some limitations in getting those. It could be because of the way we have set it up internally in our enterprise, but it would be helpful if we can customize the reporting features and some of the alerts that can go out. When we connect enterprise systems, each one looks for a different use case, and if we can get different types of reporting, it will be helpful.
My team has been working with AutoSys for the last 10 to 15 years.
It is stable.
It is used pretty much across all enterprise areas. We have six or seven business units with more than 10,000 people who are using this solution. Application-wise, close to 500 applications are using this solution.
We don't directly interact with their tech support. We have our own team for tech support. We are at the end-user level, and we request our team to set up our processes.
It is straightforward once we know the process. For its maintenance, we have our own team that manages the solution. We are the end-users, so we don't get involved in its maintenance. They just tell us about the downtime on some weekends, and they take care of upgrading the solution.
We have been using it for a long time, but now we are looking at some of the cloud solutions. We are moving a lot of processes to the cloud, and the features for the cloud are being investigated.
I would rate it a nine out of 10.
The most valuable features of AutoSys Workload Automation are the file transfer protocol and file watcher. The solution has a user-friendly user interface. It is very simple to use. You have a scope of all your jobs, jobs are what you call tasks that you will automate in the solution. It lets you monitor everything in these jobs.
AutoSys Workload Automation could improve in the Linux environment. The previous versions of the AutoSys Workload Automation let you take the profile of the user that you were using to run the tasks that you're going to automate, but in the latest versions, you can't do that, you need to make more definitions and it's a little bit difficult. It was easier in the previous versions.
In an upcoming release, AutoSys Workload Automation could include more integrations capabilities. I have seen other tools that have native integrations with other tools, such as Docker and other services in the cloud. They are not taking this into account in AutoSys Workload Automation.
I have been using AutoSys Workload Automation for approximately two years.
We have approximately 15 administrations who use this solution, but the tool is made to work for all the infrastructure of the organization, we could have more users.
The technical support is great, they have helped us a lot.
The initial configuration of AutoSys Workload Automation was simple. When you need to make a migration from previous versions or from other tools, it's easy. There are some complexities, but it is not something that is impossible, it can be very simple.
I rate AutoSys Workload Automation an eight out of ten.
My clients mainly use this solution for server workloads — work process flows around the deployment of servers, etc
This solution has made my clients' workplaces a lot less labor-intensive.
I have been using this solution for the past few months.
It is pretty stable from my understanding. I haven't heard any complaints about a run maintain.
AutoSys Workload Automation is very scalable. My clients were mainly large organizations and they never had any complaints about the scalability.
I never had to contact technical support so I cannot comment on that.
The initial setup is quite straightforward.
The pricing needs to be improved. Some of my client's complained that it was too expensive.
My advice would be to negotiate thoroughly on the price.
On a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of eight.
We are a system integrator and this is one of the products that we implement for our customers. AutoSys is primarily used for scheduling CP jobs, file transfer, and other miscellaneous jobs.
The graphical interface can be improved.
I have been working with AutoSys Workload Automation for the past five years, but not on a regular basis.
AutoSys Workload Automation is a stable solution.
This is a scalable product and we have about 50 users. We are planning to increase our usage in the future.
Since Broadcom acquired this product, the technical support has not been as good. They should really be faster and more knowledgeable.
The agent package and the other package should be more user-friendly to install.
I provide support on this product for our customers.
I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.