AutoSys Workload Automation Reviews

We use it for SAP job submission in our total environment. 

So far, performance has been excellent. It's been 100 percent satisfactory. We had a couple glitches in the beginning, during initial setup, but we've worked out everything, it's 100 percent satisfactory.

The actual scheduling of our jobs has helped us tremendously. Before it was all done manually, and we've totally automated the whole functionality, so there's no longer a case where somebody didn't run something. It's 100 percent reliable.

It cuts down on time, where actual people have to sit down and do things. We no longer have that issue, where we would have to bring in multiple people, or even hire multiple people, to come in to run certain jobs. Now, all we have to do is schedule it and it runs just fine.

More benefits with the agent upgrades, and that's about it. Other than that we have no complaints with it. It's been awesome.

So far, the stability has been great. We do have a couple minor issues with some of the agents, as far as release is concerned, but other than that it's a very stable product.

In terms of scalability, right now we're a new customer so we haven't scaled it up to other applications yet, but we are planning to. We've opened it up for our Windows environment and they are enjoying it right now. That's a very small group, for right now, but we plan on adding close to 15,000 servers to it. So it's going to benefit us a lot.

Yes, we have used tech support, and they are very helpful. Response time is awesome. Usually when we call them, we get a response back with an hour.

Our old product that we had with SAP was more of a manual process, but our company is going to more automation-based products. That was our main need, to get rid of the manual labor and, instead, just use the automated process.

I was involved in the initial set up.

The way that it was brought to us, in our initial setup, we had a lot of initial questions and they replied, "Well, set it up the way you want it."

It was kind of confusing from an end-user support aspect, asking them what are the best practices. They didn't say what the best practices were. So we had to come up with the best practices. That was the only downfall.

There were three other vendors involved, which didn't meet our full needs because we're cross-platform. We have Windows, IBM iSeries, Oracle, SQL, all that. And this product tends to fit in more with all of our products, based on just one platform alone.

When we are selecting a vendor, what's important to us are

• support, that's number one
• price
• maintenance

which all seem to be reasonably well in hand right now.

I gave it an eight out of 10 because of the support and the product; it is very easy to learn. It's pretty straightforward.

We actually were just advising colleagues who asked us about this product. We said it is very easy to use, it's multi-platform based; those were the main reasons, I would think. They actually ended up buying the product as well, with our recommendation.

For workload automation, I think the most valuable feature is the robustness, being able to support high availability for as many batch jobs that we process on a daily basis.

It is a key one for our company. We run it as an enterprise solution; everything from payrolls, to manufacturing, to everything in the back end, is critical. We definitely can count on it being up all the time.

A couple of key features would be really being able to support a scheduler that, instead of a centralized scheduler, maybe a distributed one, so where a scheduler doesn't come down; not everything stops all at one time and so on.

Stability is actually why we selected this solution, for being able to support high availability. Otherwise, we wouldn't go to a single instance of it across the company.

Scalability is actually what supports our decision to go with it. Being able to go from supporting one organization to all our organizations across the company, has been great.

Technical support has been outstanding. They've been able to really answer a lot of the questions that we've gone to for them. Turnaround has been great. Typically, if we put in a ticket, we get a response within hours, at least within 24 hours.

I wasn't engaged in the setup, but I know there were some complexities when we first started, because we were dealing with multiple instances and trying to get it to one and so on.

Definitely look at this product. There are a lot of key features in there that will definitely help organizations out.

It really supports, and CA's been great in showing the robustness of the tool and addressing any issues with anything that you come across with it.

I think there're still some more improvements in there, some things that we're finding out as we're using it, the tool. It's definitely on the higher end.

CA Workload Automation automates across multiple platforms. We're actually getting rid of our mainframe; so it's allowed us to use a distributive scheduling package. Getting rid of our mainframe is a big deal to my company.

It enables you to tie into audit systems, gives you a lot of visibility as far as workload goes, and allows you to automate it as well.

On the mainframe version of ESP, there was a scheduling parameter called NOTWITH. If you placed this parameter on two jobs you didn’t want running at the same time, ESP would recognize that one was running and the other wouldn’t run, even if its scheduling requirements had been met. This allowed our company to combat contention issues without creating extra or false predecessor/successor relationships. The D-series, ESP-DE, doesn’t have this parameter. Once we realized how much we were leveraging this feature on the mainframe version, and that we wouldn’t have it on ESP-DE, we were a little disappointed. I’m not sure how much of an undertaking it would be to have it added to ESP-DE, but it would be very beneficial to us, as well as other DE clients that I spoke with at Ca World. Hopefully this could be added to the next release of DE and we could get it in before we go totally live in production with DE early this summer.

The secure SimLib/password feature from Autosys I was referencing gave us the ability to hide/secure environment variables by storing them on a totally different server in which security could be controlled. Once the job ran that used the environment variable, or database password, a developer or operator couldn’t see the environment variable/database password resolved in the spool file. Basically what we’re looking for is the ability to store database passwords or environment variables, on or in ESP, without them being seen by a developer or operator. We don’t want anyone to see the resolved environment variables in the spool file or to have to store them on the server. Currently we’re having to store these environment variables on the server, which isn’t a permanent solution according to our Security Admins.

It seems stable, as far as I know. It's been around for awhile, so it's a good product. From our testing, it's been fine. We have a failover situation as well that we've tested; so it's worked fine for us.

We don't have any problems with scalability either. That seems to be fine for us.

Initial setup was fairly straightforward. Well, the biggest thing was that we were already using Workload Automation ESP for mainframe; so we just took that and moved it to the distributed engine, or to the DE series. There are a lot of similarities between the two.

We compared CA Workload Automation with IBM, as well as BMC. We went with CA because we really like the interface, and the way it worked with our products that we already had in house. We did have a bunch of other CA products, and it seemed to tie in pretty well with those.

It just depends on what they're coming from. If they're coming from the mainframe flavor, just know that they are similar, but there are still some very glaring differences that you have to accommodate to.

CA7 is very robust and one of CA's legacy products. The batch platform varies depending on who installed it. The iDash feature sits on the top of it, but we're not using that. 

CA7 also extracts and externalizes data without having to be reengineered, which keeps the mainframe people happy.

It's hard to share any information out of it for data analytics or anything like that because its siloed.

Also, we tried the INS data collection feature as well as the DB2 feature (except for data presentation). We're not very happy with those.

I don't recall how long we've used it, but it's been a while.

It deployed without any issue.

We've not had any stability issues.

It scales fine for us.

We tried BMC, CA, and IBM. We tried IBM OMEGAMON for a very long time, 20+ years. CA offers SYSVIEW.

MainView is a BMC product for monitoring. OMEGAMON is monitoring from IBM. Each one of them cover a different set of products.

It schedules application jobs throughout the night for different companies, various companies that AIG processes: American General Life, Life and Retirement Services, and several of their legacy partners. We monitor the input throughout the evening, make sure the cycles are complete, bring up the onlines in the morning, and run jobs per request.

• The automation of it
• The triggering
• The scheduling of the jobs
• The processes

We recently got iDash. So, we are starting to review iDash with CA-7 now, and we are using it.  

Through consistently meeting SLAs, job dependencies, and requirements.

We are not ready to go to the newest release (12.0).

It is very stable.

I do not really deal with that much. Basically, we have four processes running on four different environments.

We have gotten great support from CA. They are there whenever we need them. Whenever we open a case, they are very receptive to the issues that we have and resolve them in a timely manner.

The previous solution was very difficult to manage. The monitoring required somebody to be hands on. 

I was not involved in the initial setup.

It performs really well.

The integration that it provides and the auditing features are the most valuable to us. It also gives us an end-to-end solution that we can give our clients.

It simplifies everything and also takes human error out of a lot of things.

I would like to see a better front end for job creation that does everything for you, so it also automates the process.

In addition, I would also like to see a job form, i.e., a fill-out form for the job requests. I also want to see it set up files, folders, security, policies, etc., and automate JIL creation.

Now, it has become very stable. In the earlier releases, I have seen some issues but with the current release, it is very stable. We've been very happy with this.

The product is very scalable. With the way we have ours set up, it allows for rapid extension, if needed, but we have never maximized our systems.

We have used the technical support and it's good. They're very knowledgeable and very willing to help.

We have not used any other solution before. We've been using this product for a long time.

You should look at some of the use cases because there are so many people that have so many different setups, with so many different ways to do it. We have found the most efficient way and that is why everyone comes to us and uses our agents.

In my opinion, the most important criteria whilst selecting a vendor is reliability.

You see a lot of automation tools right now in the market. Whenever we try to look at the products that clients are trying to use, we try to see which one is better matched for their requirements. Most of the times, we try to gauge their level of understanding of the products as well. Workload Automation gives a lot of insight for the client, to better understand how they can actually automate the process of scheduling the jobs within their environment. Workload Automation really plays a good role. If you see every product come with its own workload or its own scheduling product so if you talk about SAP, SAP rebuilt its own scheduling product. You talk about Hulu which comes with Uzi which is its own scheduling product. Having a different scheduling product scattered around in the environment, it is really a tough for the management to have a better in-scope of seeing what actually is happening in the scheduling area.

Centralizing all this into a single workload automation tool using the CA product has really helped a lot of customers. This has benefited most of the users to have a better understanding of the environment. It's pretty good compared to the older versions. It actually supports a lot of new features where you can also implement in our clustered solutions and also in higher availability with more of load balancing and everything.

One of my clients who has recently converted everything from the Architecture to what they are using to the complete iPad and solutions. Deploying those solutions and integrating with them was a little challenge at this point of time. We would definitely like to see some kind of roadmap with this workload automation product, having integrations with mobility as well.

It's pretty stable compared to the older versions I would say.

The scalability - it is really good. I mean there are other products which do play the similar roles but having this workload automation in place and having a different product integrating with it whenever there is a need, you have a Windows shop today and tomorrow now most of the clients are trying to migrate from Windows to Unix. When we have that shift change happening, adding more clients and having more support for this operating systems to schedule this systems, this is really playing a lot of help in the scalability of managing this product.

I would rate them a 9 on a scale of 10. They are really good. We had a lot of help at the time of migrations that we usually plan with our clients when we do implement a solution or when we try to do the upgrades. The CA partners usually help us in even mentioning that as a hard site, because of this hard site there will be a dedicated technician who will be helping us. In order that if there is anything working during the migration period or anything like that. We don't really run around with the different people in order to get our solution done. One engineer who is dedicated to our site during that hard site period will be helping and resolving most of the issues. Support is really good with CA. Set-up is depending on the client's environment, how big and how small they are. We just need to understand that better requirements and providing that solution in order to set up this product in their environment. Makes a lot of work that we need to do in order to better understand their requirements

Setup: we can say it's not that complex compared to other products. CA has a very user friendly environment where we can actually do it in no time. Moving towards the mobility because most of the clients are converting themselves from old school sitting in front of their desktops. Everyone wants to manage through mobile products.

Rating: I would say 9/10 because I believe always there is a scope of implement for every product. There is nothing like everything is really best in product so yeah there is still scope of improvement with workload automation tool.

So far what we are doing, we are really happy with this product. When they talk about the workload automation solutions, we definitely try to explain how better it can be having worked with the CA producs compared to others. It's pretty easy because most of the corportation do understand the requirement and what best that solves. The best part of the CA is it is open to integrate with multiple products. It is not that we cannot integrate or we do not have anything like that. The support has more scope where they can also work with us in order to do a third party integration as required as well. I mean it's pretty easy for us.

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.