AutoSys Workload Automation Reviews

Scheduling, mainframe, workload.

It has performed great.

Its stability and reliability, that it's been there for 20 years and 30 years, and it's always been the number one scheduler.

We can handle large workloads, and put a lot of jobs into scheduling very quickly, and we can control a lot of workload through CA 7.

We're looking at distributed AutoSys to integrate with CA 7. And iDASH is another product that we're looking, at and we need the two to be able to talk to each other and be able to view the dependencies across the platforms.

If they can integrate the distributive side with the mainframe side, and a better view to both sides of that, that would be good.

Stability is awesome.

Scalibility is great.

Technical support is very good. We reach the right representatives.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup. They were already a CA 7 customer when I joined. I have been involved in some of the upgrades. They can be a little complex. It's just a big complex product that takes a lot of evaluation.

When we are researching different products or vendors we do a pretty thorough evaluation of all the products. They have to meet our objectives of reducing the risk and cost. Those are the two most important: risk, cost.

I would recommend CA 7.

Usually what we end up doing with Workload Automation is, we have a lot of different jobs: different batch scripts, PHP scripts, everything that we need to run at specific times in chains, with banner-related instances, which means different database connections. We need all the stuff to happen, we need to know that it's going to happen, and if it doesn't we need to make sure that we get logs as to why. That's usually the general work case that we have.

It's performed very well. I think right now the one issue that we're having is we have a lack of documentation on it and the different jobs that are inside of it. But the platform itself is working very well.

The most valuable feature is probably just the robustness of the platform itself, where you can go in and put any code inside of it and, as long as the server that you have it running on has the legs to be able to execute all that, it's good to go.

We don't have to manually run things anymore. We can have the work that a team of 50 people would do, all inside of one platform.

Again, lack of documentation, that is an issue. When we do need to bring it down for maintenance, it is always a scary moment for us because we have never had it crash. When we don't have any documentation, we don't really know what to expect if we do have to bring it down but there haven't really been any issues with it.

I'm probably not the right one to ask about features for upcoming versions mostly because we are using an old version of this product. However, if I had to, I'd probably say that it would be really nice if it had the ability to see, on a more top-level scale, what's going on inside of the system. Right now it is very granular. You do have to get very deep into the system to see what jobs are happening, when they're happening, how they're happening, if anything's failed. If they could have a more high-level view of that, that would be really nice.

I gave it an eight out of 10 because we are using an older version right now. I'm sure the newer version that they have is really great. 

The thing that's preventing us from upgrading to the latest version is personnel resources. We don't have enough staff. I think after this conference (CA World) we're probably going to be setting up new servers to go ahead and update. With that, we have a lot of financial related things on our version, so shifting everything over to the new version is going to take a lot of time. We don't know exactly how it's going to be different.

It is very stable. We haven't had it go down yet so that's very nice, that's always good. We've been using it about 10 years now and we've never had any crashes.

We haven't had any issues. If we need more space, we just throw more space on the servers. If we need to have it connect to more databases or more services, there really is no issue with it.

We have used it before, however, we haven't really needed it too much. Usually, most of the issues that we would have, you can find documentation about them somewhere online. We also know that there are other universities in Georgia that use this product so we usually end up reaching out to them before we have any other issues.

When choosing a vendor, since we're a university, what is important is the cost, and then who does it benefit. Is it going to benefit the student body? If it does, perfect. It does benefit the employees, perfect. Other than that, are there any other people, any other companies that offer something similar, and what do they do. Outside of that, how hard is it going to be for us to bring them on and what does a company do with the data that we give them. That is a very important piece. If we have to give student data to that system, does that student data go anywhere? If it does, that violates federal laws, things like that.

As far as advice, make sure that you document everything. As you're setting it up, work closely with other universities, figure out what best cases are going to be, best practices. Really just have a deep understanding of what you are wanting to do with it, what jobs that you want it to do, what processes are you wanting to map out.

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.

CA 7 Edition supplies our mainframe scheduling workflow. Automation.

It's performed well over the years. Obviously we've had CA 7 Edition for decades. It just performs its job day in, day out. Very little of having to remediate any issues with 7. Obviously there are issues with jobs eventually, but those are always developer issues, with how they've coded their JCL. But, otherwise it performs well and executes as scheduled.

• Dependability
• Delivering on the execution of the jobs
• Zero downtime 

All the above are definitely important.

Day to day it actually allows the developers to execute their critical processes for the business, running the business. I can see that expanding in the future.

It's hard to tell what needs to be improved. That's kind of why I'm here at the CA World conference, to see what options are out there that may help our developers fulfill their needs in the future. I'm trying to get a feel for what other tool sets may be available to help them do their jobs better.

I can see the analysis piece and the web client being critical parts, going into the future. Especially with the aging population, the baby boomers going out. We're very top heavy at this point within the company. As those people age out and retire, they're taking a lot of business knowledge with them. 

Stability is very good. Like I said before, very little remediation needed, close to zero. We probably have two or three tickets with CA in a year.

Obviously, scalability is dependent on the mainframe MIPS. If you need more to run the jobs, once it's running jobs, it's out of CA 7's control. We haven't any performance issues, any time recently, of it not being able to get jobs into the cues.

Customer service with CA 7 has been very good. They've helped us through several upgrades, with tickets around those. Whenever we've had issues, they've been able to point out where to look to see what potentially is affecting 7 itself.

For us, when considering vendors, a lot of it's going to depend on their 

• roadmap
• ability to service and respond to customers needs
• long term durability, are they going to be there a year from now, two years from now, 20 years from now? 

Vendors go out of business. You don't want to be in a situation where you're forced into doing a product migration to something else.

Make sure you know what the requirements of your business are, and whether it's going to meet the needs of those that are going to be using and depending on the product.

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.

We use it for running jobs of workload automation, specifically bad jobs.

The flexibility and the scalability that it can be used from the back-end. It is very user friendly.

It is more scalable. We run around 100K jobs on a daily basis. To manage that much workload on the system, it is very reliable in terms of the uptime on the system.

The scalability could be improved upon. According to the roadmap, this should be addressed in upcoming features.

The emailing feature that we have, when there is a figure, you fill it in. This should be an emailing feature that is enabled.

It had downtime, but Sevis has been very supportive in that aspect.

We run about 100K jobs on a daily basis, so this adds up to having more critical customers in terms of reliability.

We have used the Techno Global support when we have had issues. 

I was not a part of the initial setup.

I would recommend this solution.

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.

We're able to monitor a complex workload, easily see where we're at in our batch flows, and take care of problems before they become bigger issues.

We had a stuck file-watcher we weren't aware of, and then because of alerting, instead of missing an SLA, we were able to reach out and get the file in time to still make our batch commitments.

I think just having visibility into it; our managers can see what's going on too. It's not just a single technician that's a bottleneck trying to find out where we are. 

So the visibility into the workflow, and ease of use to be able to schedule.

The main push is the web UI, to be able to give it to our business users. They don't want to have to log in to a mainframe to use the product.

If we can get iDASH into ESP that would help. I know this request is the fourth... We're "in the hole," we're not even on deck. So it's going to come out to DEs, then it will come to us. That would be a big improvement, an option that we'd like to see.

No issues at all. In fact, that's actually one of the, I would say, competitive advantages of this product, the scalability and its ability to do the throughput we would need without having any delays.

We've scaled with it 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, we'd still be okay.

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

Yes, CA Scheduler, at that time. I think they were dropping support for CA Scheduler.

At that time I wasn't high enough up. By the time it 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 choosing to work with a vendor, the most important criteria I look for are

• a long-term relationship
• a partnership
• willing to grow
• willing to listen to feedback
• support
• that they'll help us do our job.

I've worked with CA Workload Automation so I'm happy. I would say they're a nine out of 10 because I don't know anyone else. It's all relative. They could be a 10. I'm happy with them. I don't have any complaints. They're responsive.

Make sure you partner with them. Get buy-in from your business units before implementing. I think that's one of the biggest keys to success. If you don't feel comfortable let them explain their product. Get the buy-in first, then move forward so you don't have the resentment of, "Hey, you're forcing this product on us."

It's been great.