AutoSys Workload Automation Reviews

I use the scheduling product to support the Home Depot stores here in the United States and Canada, as well as Mexico. It works wonderfully as it is very robust.

• Durability
• The secure database itself
• Usability of it

In a billion dollar company, you want a scheduling product that is very robust, which can handle the magnitude of schedules that we run through it.

The security of it. It is a very secure product. As well as the scalability of it. You can really scale it across systems.

It helps us to be more agile as far as the business use.

I would like to see iDASH be a packaged part of Workload Automation as opposed of being two separate packages. I would like to see iDASH be incorporated with the release of CA Workload Automation. For it to be all a complete package instead of two separate packages that I would install to enhance one another. So, we use iDASH for the recording purposes of the batch jobs that CA7 actually runs. I would like to see iDASH and CA7 become one product instead of two separate products, too. 

The agent is also a different installation as well as the scheduling packages. To see all of that incorporated under one umbrella would be ideal. 

The stability is awesome. We have not had issues in twenty years. It is just that robust, with the exception of new product/new version releases.

The scalability is awesome because we use it for the mainframe schedule as well as distributive schedule.

The support also is great from the CA company itself.

I have a CA rep that always contacts me on a quarterly basis. Also, I have support that I can reach out to 24/7.

My company has been using the CA products for years, since the start of the company itself. As our company grows, we have been growing with CA as well.

I was involved with the upgrades. They were very streamlined.

We received support from CA during upgrades which made it very streamlined. 

They do a really good job for us with their improvements and new releases, especially the agents.

When you are looking for at this product, you are not looking just for at the product itself, you are looking at the total package: The support for the product, the durability of the product, and the scalability of the product.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: support. By far, CA has the best support.

Enterprise job scheduling.

We have worked with CA to better understand all of the security points, the ability to lock the product down so that it's not being abused or exploited in any fashion.

• Flexibility
• Ease of use
• The capabilities of the product to schedule on multiple platforms, multiple operating systems.

Also, over time the CA workload agent has gotten much better. For our organization it's important for us to communicate in a secure fashion between the host and the other platforms, and we are able to do that with our CA product, with ESP.

I would rate it a nine out of 10.

Scalability is a 10 out of 10.

We've completely turned over our scheduling area, and a lot of questions go to CA support. The people in the CA support for ESP have been there for a long time. I know some of them from the time when they worked for Cybermation, and they are very good. I trust their answers.

Tech support is a 10 out of 10.

Back in 2006, we were using CA-7 and we were looking for a product that would do better for scheduling off-platform. We found ESP, which was at that time owned by Cybermation, and we completed migration from CA-7 to ESP, and then shortly after that CA bought ESP. It had to do with scheduling on the distributed platform.

CA-7 was expensive and didn't do distributive work load very well. It was not that flexible. It didn't do everything we needed it to do.

We had Professional Services help us, and it wasn't really that difficult.

We did have onsite training and migration services and we paid for them. It wasn't hard to understand for our people.

I don't really get involved in that part of it. The one thing I would say is that people need to pay attention to how they use their ESP agents on the distributed platform. That's where some of the cost comes in, based on how many you need or how many you use.

At that time CA owned three schedulers and CA-7 was the one we were using. The other two did not necessarily apply to our environment. And there weren't too many others out there. I think we might still have taken a cheap route. We might not of actively compared with other products that were on the market at the time, other than comparing it to CA, and we thought we were getting a good deal.

I believe CA had been actively developing it, enhancing it, and attempting to make it easier to use. I think it's been a good product for us, and I think others would find that to be true as well.

We run Automator processes and applications, so we use AutoSys for batch processes. This is pretty much it.

It works well. It has its issues, but we work with support to resolve our issues and get them taken care of in a timely manner.

We are able to process hundreds of thousands of jobs a month. It is pretty good. We have failover, so we maintain continuous uptime. 

Probably WCC. The aggregator reporting utility which tells us our throughput in lag and latency. 

• A better graphical user interface. We have a lot of people using the client utility, and we want to get them away from that. It needs to be easier to use, quicker, and more user-friendly.
• Ease of implementation for upgrades. 
• Some support issues need to be addressed. Not through email, but through personal contact via phone or WebEx.

It seems pretty stable. We have had issues in the past and we have worked through support to minimize any downtime. Again, with the failover solution, we are able to stay working 24/7. 

It seems to be there. I think we have some issues that we need to address with lag and latency. We have two instances of production AutoSys and we want to collapse that into one, so we want to work with CA to figure out a better solution of how to use the single instance to process all our workload.

Technical support has been very responsive to our needs and helped where we have needed help.

I was not involved in the initial setup. We did do a migration recently, which I worked on. That included setting up a new environment to move our workload from an older, unsupported version to the newer version. The sales and support team and technical teams were responsive and answered every question when I needed assistance.

It is stable, it works, and it does what it is supposed to. I would recommend this solution.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: support. Providing knowledge and giving us the ability to address any issues or problems of the software.

We use CA Workload Automation ESP Edition to monitor our batch jobs and workload, to process data, and in that processing of data, we make sure that we complete the jobs in a timely manner so that we meet our service levels. 

We also use the alerts within ESP to detect if there's a failure, if there's a long running job or, if there's an issue with the job, within the scheduler, that didn't trigger correctly, and things like that. So that's primarily what we use ESP for.

It performs, it definitely does the job because it's an enterprise type of software, so it's used throughout our whole company. We really liked it, and we applied it throughout the whole company.

The ability to

• monitor your critical work 
• track the service levels 
• recover the work and predict the work, if it's late or not.

It hasn't really improved things because, before that, we had something similar. It hasn't not improved, but it's just necessary to use for the type of work we do.

It's definitely helped us meet our critical deadlines and things like that.

Easier user options with the web browser part of it because it's not very friendly and you can't do as much as you can on the native software. They already know that.

It's very stable. It's highly redundant. It's, like I said, very recoverable, within the batch work and it's easy to use.

Scalability, it's all based on the agents, so we have to place all these agents on different servers. That seems to be doable, so we haven't had any problems with scalability.

We have used technical support. We have small use cases that we need their help on, and we're able to reach out to CA. Tech support is good. We get a good response.

We were using a similar product before 2008, BMC Control-M. We know that's the way we need to manage the work.

I was involved in the initial setup and it's complex because you have to convert from the old software that's not CA to the new software. That was back in 2008 so it's been awhile.

I think there was a list of different types of companies. I can't remember the names because, like I said, it's been a while.

I would say the most important criteria to us when selecting a vendor are

• usability
• operational friendliness
• cost, obviously
• and scalability, because we have a global footprint around the world in different datacenters. 

And it needs to be something that's maintainable or the maintenance is robust. That's something with which we've had good luck, and a good experience, with CA.

I would just say, based on your use case, to see what flavor of ESP you wanted, whether it's the mainframe, or distributed systems, and then understand what kind of functionality you want to achieve from it. Get users' suggestions, if they already have it set up, so you can get past some of those stumbling blocks at the beginning.

Some of the features I like are:

• Ability to monitor a complex workload
• Easily see our batch flow status
• Deal with problems before they become bigger issues

As an example, we had a stuck file watcher we weren't aware of. Due to the alerts, we were able to reach out and get the file in time to still make our batch commitments. This happened instead of missing an SLA.

I think having visibility has improved things. Our managers can see what's going on as well. It's not just a single technician that's a bottleneck trying to find out where we are. Visibility into the workflow and ease of use to be able to schedule have improved our organization. I'm happy with this solution.

The main push is the web UI. We want to be able to give it to our business users. They don't want to have to log on to a mainframe to use the product. I would like to use iDash. If we can get iDash into ESP, it would be great, even though it first has to go to the DEs before it comes to us. That would be a big improvement. This is an option that we'd like to see.

No problems with scalability. That's actually one of the competitive advantages with this product - the scalability and its ability to do the throughput we need without having any delays. We have scaled as far as we can grow. I've been talking to other companies that are much larger. I'm confident it could scale if we had a tenfold growth and we'd still be okay.

I have not used technical support. Other people in my area have. They seem easy to work with. You know, get the documentation to them; they get back to you in a couple days with what they found.

We were using CA Scheduler Job Management and I think they ended support. I wasn't high enough up to be involved in the decision making process. By the time this solution rolled out, I was happy with how I was able to get up to speed in the product, and support what I needed to support. But I was not involved in evaluating other products.

When looking for a vendor, I suggest looking for long-term relationships, a partnership. You want a vendor who is willing to grow, willing to listen to feedback, offers support, and help us do our job. Make sure you partner with them. Get buy-in from your business units before implementing. I think that's one of the biggest things to success, is let CA get the buy-in for you if you don't feel comfortable doing it yourself. Let CA explain their own product. Get the buy-in first, then move forward so you don't have the resentment of the business units thinking you forced the solution upon them.

Most of all it automates the processes we need to get done at night. We've grown into it. We have several thousand jobs in our production environment right now, about 40,000 altogether, and that number's going to be growing because with the success that we're seeing with certain applications that have submitted jobs to the workload automation, other groups in our company are saying "Hey, we want to get onboard too and automated our processes, too."

The benefits are that it's automated, reporting facilities are terrific, also when there is, let's say, a failure of a job, it's very, very easy to report that incident, that event, and we can certainly notify the appropriate personnel who need to be notified of that, very, very quickly.

I've wondered about certain features. Our release of iDash right now is 11.4. I have seen release 12 in the labs and presentation and I'm just blown away by the features that I see. Many of the things I was thinking about, asking about, they were already answered in the new release. CA has a roadmap and they have even more features coming in down the road which I like very much, so we're very, very happy with that, and that goes of course, for other products as well.

12 years.

No issues. Once we went from version 4.5 to 11.0 and now 11.36, we have experienced great stability as time goes on.

No problems with scalability at all. Our centralized AutoSys server are running processes, jobs on several hundred client machines without a problem, without a problem at all. We foresee a growth in that as time goes on over the next year or so.

We have great faith in the CA tech support website, and their responses to us every time we have a question, even if it's just a question on functionality, never mind it might be a problem that may come up, they respond to us very quickly; so we feel very, very secure with that. That actually is also true for many other CA products that we have at our sites as well.

If we did have a serious problem, which happens very, very rarely - we contact them by email; they've resolved every single issue that we've had.

We had AutoSys 3.4 which used to belong to Platinum Technologies, they became part of CA. I'm thinking right now compared to what it was like then back in 2004, the number of jobs was very, very small, but we knew that as we went forward with CA with the new releases that it would grow very easily with that and meet the demand, which it has done, and we don't see any problem, any limit to the software at this point.

No, not complex at all, very, very easy. One of the products I'm working on which is CA iDash, a monitor for the automation tools, is extremely easy to use, extremely easy to install, to setup, to configure and run. In fact, that was one of our reasons for going with it this past year, that particular product of the whole CA Workload Automation package.

When it comes to advice I would say that obviously cost is one factor, I never get involved with that, but cost is a factor. That's a very good question because we recently purchased iDash this year, and it's intended to replace a third party competitor software which we're using right now, and even though iDash was about 15% more, because of licensing and ease of use, that 15% more is more than paid for by the flexibility we have, because the other software we're limited to how many instances we can have of it, and how many jobs it can see - iDash, no limit at all. As many iDash instances as we want, and there's no limited to how many AutoSys environments we're going to be monitoring, and that's a real plus for not only the users but also IT management and upper management as well.

Rating: at least 9.5, 9.6/10 for sure. I probably shouldn't say 10 because I want to give CA something to work at and work towards, so 9.9.

I heartily recommended them, even if they had software such as the Terma Labs JAWS or something else, to really very seriously consider looking at iDash for the lot of features, it's so easy to use, I said "CA will be very glad to a proof of concept test trial install for you, and then you can do a comparison." I didn't try to push people, say "Oh, iDash is a lot better." I said "I think they should decide for themselves." But I think it'll be evident once they get it in, look at it, and do a comparison. There's a good guarantee they'll go in that direction, I would think, based upon my own experiences.

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.

Workload automation and job scheduling.

The graphical interface makes it more accessible to all end-users for monitoring. It also has automated failover, and flexibility in solving job scheduling challenges.

The flexibility allows us to successfully integrate an acquired business’ fiscal close with our own, even though there is a lot of variance as to when they run in the calendar month.

• Easy to use.
• Supports job scheduling on mainframe and distributed systems.

Better documentation with fully explained examples for some of the job types.

No issues with stability.

No issues with scalability.

Excellent support, skilled support technicians.

Old solution did not have a distributed support model that was robust enough.

It was complex. We had to convert our old solution to the new one with no downtime.

I’m not involved with this aspect of the product.

We did not evaluate other options.

This product has allowed us to provide more business value to our company by automating more processes.