AutoSys Workload Automation Reviews

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.

We needed to replace Allen Systems Zeke/Zebb back in 2000, since the product was not being updated anymore. ESP met our needs.

It gives us flexibility when doing releases. We can make changes for one day in a PDS member, since we stage our jobs by date, and the next day the normal job definitions are run.

Flexibility of scheduling jobs in PDS members, and not a database, gives you so many more options. ESP is a solid product and works extremely well, it's very reliable. Enhancements are always being added with new features.

You can add jobs/applications/agents in ESP very quickly; it just takes minutes to do.

The GUI/Workstation is weak and needs to be improved. CA is working on this right now; the web based GUI is in beta mode at this time.

ESP is rock solid. It is as reliable as it gets.

No issues with scalability.

Technical support, when it was Cybermation, was much more solid. Now that it's CA, at times the support is excellent and other times it’s not as good.

Allen Systems Zeke/Zebb had issues, and was being sold to different companies at the time. The product did not move forward.

We had Cybermation come in-house to work with us, in doing the conversion back in 2001. It took about one year to convert all of our systems.

CA pricing has been a problem, and not looked upon favorably here at all.

BMC Control-M, IBM TWS.

CA ESP is a solid product and very easy to use. It allows you to be very creative in what you do. It is well liked here and is very easy to learn. The customized views that each individual can create, and ones that can be made free-form, makes this very popular with the programmers.

SME for Cross Platform Agent installation and configuration. We have taken over ownership from the Unix Ops Team for installing, configuring, and administering the Systems Agents. I have also installed and stood up the Web Client. Currently, rolling it out to the general population of our company.

Scheduling workload across multiple platforms from a single point of contact and integration with ERP/ETL type platforms and products, such as Oracle and SEQUEL.

• Flexible agent configurations
• Integration with multiple services and applications across the enterprise.

Sunset CA-7 and stop leading people on with it. 

ESP, Dseries, and now Automic are CA's strategic vision. Not much engineering being done with CA-7 any longer. As a "batch scheduler", it is and always has been a workhorse. As we all know, batch scheduling is antiquated. Workload Automation is the future and changing the product name to CA Workload Automation, CA-7 Edition does not make it a modern WLA Platform.

Mostly its stability.

With requirements, they have "always" and "skip" on them. That would be nice, for them to have it on triggers also. So, if a customer says, "I want to demand this output, only these certain triggers," the scheduler could shut it off.

It's very, very stable. We've never had any problems with it.

I would give scalability a 10 out of 10.

We've used it for a couple of questions when we didn't know the answers. They were great, and very informative. We've even used it for CA Datacom. And since I was a newbie doing upgrades with that, they pretty much held my hand through it, and gave me different suggestions. So, thumbs up to them.

The one that we actually support is the CA-7 Edition for the scheduling package. It's very, very stable, always has been. And we rarely have any problems with it, so that's great.

The important criteria when selecting a vendor include

• that it works with other products
• stability, definitely
• and that it works great in DR.

If I were to advise someone who is looking at this kind of solution, I would say always look at multiple products, and decide from there. I would tell themabout the staple we've had with the CA-7 here, some people may say it's old, pre-historic, but it works great for us.

It streamlines processing really well, so we're able to cut down on our processing times.

Ease of use.

I honestly don't know I can't think of anything to improve.

Stability is rock solid. We haven't had any major issues with it, not even minor issues. It's been good.

We use technical support all the time. We would be lost without them. They're fantastic. Really good job. We're able to reach the right person to help us out right away. 

I've done multiple products. I've been significantly involved in setup. It's very straightforward. Easy installation. Just follow the steps that installation requires and that's it.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor are a good reputation and good technical support.

I would suggest researching CA. It's good.

It's our enterprise workload automation scheduler. 

It performs pretty well, it's a pretty stable product.

It allows you to automate tasks, and reduce headcount, prevent errors, self-heal, self-service type technologies.

• Ease of use 
• Scripting capabilities

In the next release I would like to see the Service Orchestrator, a B2B product, and maybe a process audit.

It's very stable. Just the usual database problems, but the application, normally, doesn't have any problems at all.

The system itself is not scalable but you can add multiple connections into it. You can use the APIs to integrate with other systems.

We use tech support all the time. They're pretty good. The response time from them depends on the complexity of the problem. They could do better sometimes.

It's a requirement for all large corporations to have some type of enterprise scheduler. We went with CA because they are a good partner, and they're pretty stable, and they acquire everybody else. They only have two main competitors, IBM or BMC.

Straightforward. It's not difficult.

Our most important criterion when selecting a vendor is the partnership.

I give the solution an eight because it has a few quirks, but it's a pretty reliable system. They could do better supporting it. They have too many of the same type of products, so sometimes it doesn't get as much attention as it should.

I would advise a colleague who is looking at similar solutions to stay informed with the technology, and engage with the CA reps. 

I would recommend it whole-heartedly.

We schedule overnight and daily jobs, mainly on a Cc&B system. We do file transfers from outside agencies, things like financial pledges and meter readings.

It performs very well. As far as the product is concerned, all of our issues are really with the system that we call rather than with the AE product itself. 

We were able to eliminate an overnight operator job, for one thing. He just left, but we did not replace him.  We get better reports than we use to have. Basically it runs jobs on a schedule, but we already had the jobs. It also eliminates manual job starting.

Its scheduling and its notification to us. We need to know when things are taking too long and when it fails, but we really need to schedule jobs to run. We need to have things run in a very sequential order, so it is very useful that we can schedule the work flows.

There is a difference between a web interface and the thick client interface. We particularly like a thick client interface, and it has gone away. I am finding that is disappointing to me. Now, it looks like the web interface is where all the development is going, which means it will become more full-featured than any thick clients that might be compatible with the new version. I would hate to see the thick client be left behind. I would really like to see that thick client come along.

I would really like to see a feature where if you have a variable object and you reference it anywhere, in any object or script, that you could somehow click on it and resolve the value and display it.

This is one thing I would really like to see in a new release of it. I have no idea if that has already been implemented or not, because we do not have the latest version, but I would really like to see something like that.

As far as I can tell, it is stable. We are just transferring to the AE version, but we were using Automation Manager for two years before that. 

I can't recall the actual product failing in any way. 

The tool can probably handle way bigger stuff than what we are doing. 

We are a gas distribution company, but we also own other companies. We are only using this at one of our locations where there are several million customers. We are firing off jobs that are billing those customers, managing meter readings, and various other billing-related financials and lettering processes. We are not at a Netflix or American Airlines level. I am pretty sure we have way more capacity in the product then what we are using. 

I do not think that I called technical support, though I think we have reported a software bug. There is one bug that we noticed, which is kind of annoying. So, aside from that, I do not think we used technical support at all.

I have looked up stuff on the CA Community. I might have gone into some of the Community pages to look for a solution. Nothing really memorable though.

Since we are still using the AE product and we are just transferring into it, we are still talking to the consultants, the people who actually came in and sold it to us, installed it, and trained us. So, we still have those as resources at this time. We have not really needed the Community.

As I recall, there is a transfer application from our AM to our AE. That went very well. Any problems that we had with that we probably caused ourselves, because we wanted to rename a lot of stuff, which was probably a bad idea, but I could not control that. 

I think it was relatively smooth. It could have been smoother. I do not think it was a fault of the program. I think it was more our fault. 

I would recommend it. Actually I do not even know another automation product. I would not know what else to recommend.

I appreciate training and support from a vendor. They should come in, train us on the product, and be around for a while, or at least available, to help us with anything we should have learned or did not. Or, things we discover we need. Training and early on support are really important and we really would like to see, like the same person providing it. 

I would like to be able to contact him and say, "Hey, how do I do such and such? How do I attach this report to this thing? How do I filter this?" And he would reply with, "Here are some codes you might find useful." I know these would be available out in the community, but I should not have to look it up because I am still in training. That is just one thing I would like.

Primary use is job scheduling. It performs admirably. It really does what it is supposed to do. I have been doing this for 19 years with AutoSys.

We have ended up using it as a Tier 1 application supporting other Tier 1 applications. We schedule all jobs, everything from payroll to how to move oil around the country.

• Reliability
• Stability
• Expandability: It scales well.

A lot of what we want is going to be based on our particular solution, not for something everybody else could use at the same time. Different companies use AutoSys differently. They have different standards and different methodologies. A solution that we want in place would not apply to other companies.

From what we heard, the features we want are being included with the next couple of releases. One is to be able to work and create automatic ticketing solutions that are not necessarily CA products. It is just the automation around getting jobs to work correctly. If something fails, what do we do then.

I would like to be able to see the product grow into something that is going to be more reliable and better. The new purchase of Automic should help.

It is very reliable. There is always been a bump here there, but it really does well for us.

It scales very well. We can add jobs and remove jobs. We do not have problems maintaining the product across multiple environments and multiple servers.

The initial contact is not very reliable. We have to escalate through channels to get to somebody who knows what's going on. It takes time that we do not necessarily have. It is because its that the support tech is not dedicated to the product and they do not know how to fix our exact issue.

We have waited years for a problem to be resolved. The tickets get closed with no resolution, and there should be a resolution but we can't get a reliable answer. We run out of patience and just close the tickets.

We take advantage of the CA Community, however it is hit and miss. There are a lot of good questions and answers, but also a lot of simple ones, where people just look at them and go, "Just read the manual. It's in there."

It was both straightforward and complex. The information gathering to get the product installed takes time and effort. Once we had everything gathered, the installs went very smoothly and quickly.

The complexity of the product has to do with the information gathering:

• What it has to do? 
• Where it has to do it? 
• How it has to interface? 
• What databases are we connecting to and to what IDs? 
• What servers are we logging into? 
• What IDs do we have to use? 
• How are the parts connecting? 
• Are there ports that need to be opened? 
• Are there firewalls that need to be adjusted? 
• Are there various things that we have to account for that we were not initially thinking about? 

The documentation covers these, but it is just a matter of gathering all of them. The information gathering can take a week. The product install takes minutes.

The actual decision to install AutoSys was out of my hands, but it was recommended. It is one of the better products on the market.

Use this product. I have used the competitors' products. I have used AutoSys. If there is a comparison, I will give them my views as to what I think of all the products. My view right now, use AutoSys.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Service
• Reliability
• Support
• If we are able to actually contact our sales reps and get solutions and answers from them. 
• If we are able to open tickets and get answers to some of the easier questions.
• Are they willing to come in and sit with us, and make sure we are getting things done correctly the first time.