In our current environment, we have a large community of users. So Workload Automation helps us with our complex job scheduling with automating placements.
I believe it's a mission-critical application that is required within the company because everything requires to be scheduled. Everything needs to move. In today's economy, everything is 365-24/7.
In all aspects of the company, whether you're in the actual trading or in the wholesale or retail space, you're our internal client and we treat you like a customer. Ultimately, we're in operations.
It needs more complex scheduling capabilities on the end points. For that to happen, you really need the next version of AutoSys that has the ability to do that. We used it as an opportunity to test out what that next version going to look like, so when we deployed enterprise-wide, we had a little bit of understanding of how it's going to work.
Also, it shouldn't take longer than six months to do a deployment. I heard good things about being portable, meaning CA is able to introduce a lot of agents as packages on top of your existing environment that you're going to add. That's some of the good things that I'm hearing and I'm looking forward to seeing those because our business requirements always expand.
I'd also like to see iDASH integration with monitoring, which I think is up and coming.
I've used it for almost 3 years.
I've had no issues deploying it.
We've had stability issues, but CA's pretty prompt about fixing things for us. We've had commonly-known bugs that are fixed after an upgrade.
It's been scalable. Architecture-wise, it's pretty robust, and we've been able to work it out with CA. We run over 10,000 jobs a day.
Technical support is relatively on the upper hand of some of the companies that we deal with because we do have dealings with our account management team. When we have a major deployment, the support team is made fully aware of that. If, for example, if we're doing a deployment on the weekend, we have a 1-800 number that we can call. It's been great.
For the original implementation, I wasn't involved, but we are moving to a newer release. We have built an environment where I was involved. Complexity-wise, it's more or less a specific business requirement that we needed.
At this moment, we've been pretty long-term customer with CA. I don't think there's any product out there that we're going to be willing to switch out at the moment, given what their customer base is, what the capabilities of the product and how it fits into our model.
A somewhat surprising review...
CA WAAE will easily scale up to 50,000 jobs a day per single instance and more if the jobs starts are relatively evenly distributed in time. The vendor claim and a quarter of a million with the recent service pack3 improvements (not verified) which introduce new threads for handling agent communications.
The UI (WCC) is relatively poor but will scale up to tens of concurrent users and hundreds of defined views (we have over 300 defined users and over 100 jobflow views per instance). A lot of development effort has been spent by the vendor to improve the UI and this is still on-going. The UI is 24/7, the issues are elsewhere.
Bear in mind that the strength of of CA WAAE (Autosys) is its relative simplicity, which enables both administrators and end users to get up to speed with it quickly and start getting value from it in a matter of days. Therefore it is logical the that UI is always going to be somewhat less rich than some more complex and feature rich products.
As far as stability, yes there are some issues: not so with the UI though but with the application server. Also the security module (EEM) cluster failover seems somewhat unreliable and prone to corruption (for instance if you run out of disk space the settings will get corrupt as some xml settings file get clobbered).
The built-in application cluster is old fashion and a bit slow to fail over. More modern technologies should be considered for resilience.
Re. SLA and deadline monitoring, the base product does lack functionality although the reviewer suggests otherwise. Some useful improvements are in the road map but more importantly this aspect if very well covered by complementary products such as iDash or JAWS.
Lastly on the licencing aspect, this is obviously a matter between the vendor and one's organisation but be informed that there is nothing in the product that will block or preempt any functionality based on licence (expiration or limit etc.), except for some of the advanced agents plugins which do not come out of the box and need to be purchased separately.
I hope this helps