AutoSys Workload Automation Reviews

I find that it provides better agility in regards to job execution features.

The CA Autosys has assisted our organization by providing effective backend automation for enterprise application functionality.

This product needs to improve its graphical user interface.

I have used this product for about 12 years.

Lot of automation required and need to be aligned with DevOps.

I have not encountered any issues with stability.

I have not encountered any issues with scalability.

7/10

CA Technologies provides good technical support and I would give it a 7 out of 10 rating.

I found the installation process easy to follow.

Implement through vendor as special skills.

This product offers more jobs and stability.

After conducting extensive market evaluation, we chose the CA Autosys tool.

I would recommend to make use of outsourced software solutions such as Atgen for ensuring a stable setup process.

We find scheduling to be the most valuable feature because we can do so on multiple platforms and we can define them once then re-use them.

It's given our organization stability because we're able to perform scheduling functions that provides order and predictability to our workload.

I can't think of anything at the moment.

We've had no issues with deployment.

Never had any issues, which is the main reason we use it. We don’t use other products for scheduling on the mainframe.

We’ve never had any issues. We run over 300,000 jobs a day and we have thousands of end users, at least 10,000 who can evaluate their flows and manage schedules.

We've never needed tech support.

I've always been using it, so there was no previous solution.

The initial setup was done around 30 years ago, so I don't know whether it was simple or complex.

When we look for new products, the user functionality and ease of use are important, as is making sure it's stable. The knowledge transfer is easy.

We still use the green screen on the mainframe terminal screen instead of having a Windows-based view – though it's our decision. Overall, it's a good tool for an entire mainframe environment.

CA Workload Automation AutoSys Edition is one of the most powerful schedulers that you have on the open systems, or going between Window servers; to be able to schedule and take advantage of the different powers that the automation has with it.

I've taken advantage of not only the normal command jobs and stuff like that, but I've turned them into using the proper plugins, the job types. One of the things that I have found out is that I'm the one that's using most of the job types, because I've taken away the need for writing or scripting processes. When somebody knows the database and knows how to write SQL code, or they know how to write a stored procedure, they don't need to know how to write scripting in order to run their scripts.

It's a little bit of a cost savings thing by using a plugin and using the different job types that AutoSys has. It goes the same thing when you're running a web service and you want to update stuff.

Taking care of the customers is the number one thing for any client; the client that I'm with, it's the same thing. They want to make sure that the customers are happy.

The benefit of using this product is the fact that your return on investment is major. When you don't have to teach people how to script or how to write different codes because of the way they connect to stuff, you're saving money, because you're able to put stuff into a production environment in a much faster solution.

We're also able to update our customers and let them know via apps to be able to see from using a web service to run and they log in to see what their activity is or what the status is on their stuff. It's updated immediately.

Cost benefits are amazing because somebody doesn't have to call a customer service person and sit on the phone for 30 minutes to find out the same thing they can find out in two seconds on the internet.

To make it a lot more user-friendly, in order to make it so other people can use it without having to do much training with it; the more user-friendly it is, the easier it is to work with.

The product has been out since 2.0 which is when I started working with this Workload Automation and, have seen it grow to a more powerful system that has been able to resolve all types of different automation appliances.

Customer Service is as always a high quality and, have had great success with getting any issues resolved.

Great working with the Tech team.

I think it's one of the most powerful workload automation processes that are out there. It is able to reach across platforms. It's able to reach across appliances. It's able to update.

It's a matter of your return on investment. It goes right back to that. How much do you want to spend, but how much are you going to save?

CA Workload Automation AE (AutoSys Edition) should have a few features like the CA7 FQJOB command (to get all the downstream/upstream jobs with the batch current position).

I have used this solution for seven years.

We have not encountered any stability issues with the supported versions.

We have not encountered any scalability issues with the supported versions.

Technical support is 9/10; good and timely support.

It is a bit costly. (Again, it all depends on the enterprise and the requirements.)

Before choosing this product, we also evaluated BMC Control-M.

I would suggest implementing CA Workload Automation AE.

• Automation of patch process
• SQL integration
• Reporting

It has improved our organization by automating processes in a centralized platform. We are more productive and we can provide a better value to the business.

SQL server clustering is not supported.

We have been using the product for seven years.

Maintenance to the database must be performed to prevent stability issues.

We did not encounter any issues with scalability.

The technical support is good.

We previously used SQL but that solution is very limited.

The setup was straightforward.

Validate how many agents you need beforehand.

We evaluated JAMS.

I recommend that they evaluate a high availability infrastructure.

The most valuable feature is the ease of coding up schedules to run jobs in both the mainframe and distributed environments.

Prior to installing ESP, we had to use two products: one for mainframe and one for distributed.

It allowed us to consolidate our monitoring down to one particular console in one particular environment.

We need the ability to be able to have Windows user passwords changed periodically and automatically.

I have used it for 6 and 1/2 years.

When we first installed ESP, we had a few issues with the ability of jobs to have their status reported across sysplexes.

We have not encountered any issues with scalability.

Technical support is 7 out of 10, with 10 being exceptional.

We previously had Maestro for scheduling the distributed environment and CA7 for scheduling the mainframe environment.

The setup was not too terribly complex, but it did take some time to learn all the complexities of the product.

Well, the product is part of our ELA with CA, but we do have a specific number of licenses we can use for the distributed agents we deploy, so you have to be careful as to what limit you set for number of agents, so you have room to grow in your environment.

Before choosing this product, we also evaluated BMC Control-M.

Take the time to learn how to use the GUI and learn how to code the schedules. There are a lot of different ways to code schedules.

What we really like is that it's an enterprise solution and it really allows us to do the "normal work," the different operating systems and platforms, but it also allows us to manage and control our ERP systems, and things like Informatica and Hadoop, and all those good things that are coming down the line, in the way of big data and things like that.

The really nice thing is that, as the business grows, we're not seeing the infrastructure grow. Regardless of how much new business we keep on, the team is pretty stable. We have a dedicated team of eight people. We maintain today nine instances of DE: three production and six pre-production. We're probably going to add a couple more in 2017, but we don't anticipate having to grow the infrastructure. We'll be able to keep serving the customers the same way we have historically and we'll be able to do that into the future, without seeing any degradation in service.

We would like to see good improvement on the historical reporting capabilities. It's always been, I think, a bit of a weak point. Currently, if you know a SQL programmer, he should become your best friend, but I'd like to see it get to the point where somebody with really basic skills – where they understand the information they want – can easily extract it. That's really the big area with room for improvement.

The development team has been really good about keeping up with not only our requests but the user community as a whole. We're pretty happy about it, but that's the one exception.

It's extremely stable. We put in the Canadian systems about three years ago, and we have not had an incident in the three years that has kept us down for more than a couple of hours.

Support has been really good. If we need to call somebody, generally they're on the line in a few minutes, and we get right into the diagnostics and we're set to go again. Extremely stable; the agents are perfect. They never give us a problem at all. The servers are getting awfully close.

It's our impression that we're probably one of the larger installations in the world. We have two instances controlling our Canada operation; it’s really Canada and the rest of the world. It was suggested that we spin up the second instance, but we really haven't seen a good reason for doing that, other than we keep some of the competing lines of business separated. Other than that, it seems to scale really well and we can keep going with it.

Tech support, as I’ve mentioned, has been great. I know that CA has kept some people in support for a very long time, so they're very comfortable with the product. They know how the thing works. They know if it ever makes a particular hiccup, what's exactly causing that. We actually are on the Platinum support program, so we have a dedicated support resource. Historically, that person has been outstanding. He's always just a phone call away. He's knowledgeable not only about the product but our environment. Based on that, he can do a really, really good job for us.

Before I came to my current job, I was actually an independent consultant. The last job I worked before I came to work here was converting all the material into the system. I've been there since day one. Initial setup has always been really, really straightforward. Architecturally, the solution make sense. There's a very good separation of functions and features. The security is outstanding and because the solution is English language-based, we don't really need to go out and put in a lot of infrastructure support to do the normal stuff. Basically, if you want a job to run on Tuesday, you simply tell it, run on Tuesday, and it miraculously works.

We were in a situation where we had one of everything and we really went out to do a consolidation in the solutions that we were using. We really saw the CA solution as something that would give us the reliability and the scalability to move us forward in the future. We really didn't see that from a lot of the other solutions in the industry, so we chose them.

When we are selecting a vendor, the support is really the first and foremost criteria, and then I guess support going forward, so, the development organization: How are they addressing changes in the industry, changes in the solution? That sort of thing.

Look really hard at what your requirements are today. Know that you're going to have a solution that you're going to be able to stick with for as long as you care to stick with it; also, something that can address audit requirements, address things like scalability, and usability. If you have to become an expert on how to make the product work and use it, then it's probably not as usable as you need it to be. Look for something that you can talk to, like you were talking to your little brother, and move forward from there.

The reasons for my rating are usability, reliability, and scalability of the solution.

Over time we have found that if there are any issues with communication between the various components [ scheduler (eventor) ,app server (as_server) , database (event server), the agents, etc ] that when connectivity is restored, jobs start executing as desired and anything that is stuck or is in an ‘strange state’ is easily found and rectified using the tools provided by autosys.

We have found that most of the time the WorkLoadAutomationAE software requires very little maintenance and has achieved an almost 100% uptime in all the instances we have running in our DEV/TEST/and PROD environments.

IOW – Although there are many components involved, once things are setup correctly, the application performs solidly, is extremely redundant (again, if setup correctly) and has very little maintenance overhead.

We've just recently upgraded to the 11.3.6 Workload Automation platform. We're still implementing the pieces, but what we found is, there's a lot more reporting with it. It's a lot more stable. There are a lot more features available, that we've yet to even take advantage of.

When we first went to 11.3.6, they didn't have their agent monitoring platform produced. As of this date, we haven't even installed their agent orchestrator yet. We're trying to work to get those in. I can't specify what I would like right now, unfortunately, because we haven't fully implemented the product, so I don't know what's missing.

They have a lot of great features; these new job types that we've yet to even start implementing. Some of that's going to require some philosophical change on how we promote the code, so I don’t have hard information on it. I would just say to CA, stay on the roadmap.

My opinion, from what I've seen, is, when we started with 11.3.6 service pack 0, the initial release (now they're up to service pack 5), I've seen them address all my concerns regarding, how do we manage the agents from a centralized location and all? I think they're on the right track, but at this point, I can't say, "Wow, they're missing this key feature.", because they seem to have everything that I've been thinking about in the pipeline.

When we started the new product and we introduced it, we started getting some new alarm types and the agent went offline. The architecture about how the scheduler monitors the agents, it knows when the agent on the workload server actually disappears and it reports that. I was talking to our service engineers and so forth, and I said, "You have an alarm that goes off, that says the scheduler's lost contact with server x's agent and it's logged in a log. When it recovers, that's logged in the log, but there's nothing from an alert perspective." Basically, you have a system that alerts you when there's a problem, but doesn't alert you when it's resolved.

I said, "We don't look at AutoSys, or in this case, Workload Automation, to be the correlation engine for what we escalate, but if you're going to put out an alarm that says the sky is falling, I've lost contact with an agent, and you log that in your log." I kind of said, "It would be nice if you put out the same type of information alert, that shows that it cleared, since the log of the application shows that. You're basically saying, the sky is falling and then when the sky is caught, you don't alert us that it's all better.”

It caused a little confusion since our NOC is reaction based. We see the alert and then when it clears, they don't see that it cleared, so we have to do additional work. I've talked to CA about it. They said, "It's an interesting idea. We'll take it under advisement.", because it's not a bug, it's more like undocumented features.

What I like about the product is, we've had issues at the infrastructure level, regarding components that stopped seeing each other, or they got out of sync regarding, say, the database communications. Once the system reestablishes itself, you don't have to worry about if something happens in your infrastructure regarding, “Oh my God, my jobs are going to get out of sync.” The system does a really good job of piecing current status together and giving you accurate results. That's a good stability piece.

Our implementation is not that huge on it. It's a couple of small instances of Workload Automation that do a lot of work. From a scalability perspective, I enjoy the fact that, when we scale our networks – we have our servers that actually perform the work out in disparate parts of the company – we don't have to bring the whole infrastructure in. The application server layer of the product line really allows you to centralize the control, without having to have direct, direct contact to every single component out there. It's a nice tiered approach. I see it that the scalability is in line with where I see our company going.

Interestingly enough, with technical support, it's a huge company, so even though you have a one-to-one relationship with, maybe, your professional services or your account manager, when you call support, they don't really have that history. I found that, with a lot of companies, you're concerned about, I have to start with a tier-one person, I have to re-explain my problem.

What I've experienced with CA, over the last, say, 2-3 years that I've actually worked with them directly and their product, is, they understand that. I've actually gotten very good results, because it's not just a technical part that they see. I think that CA and their technical support for this product understands the human condition that's involved, the concerns. I don't have to worry that, if I have an issue, I have to justify my concerns about my support issue. They understand that and they address it proactively, which, for the most part, gives me an overall good customer experience using their support.

We just recently upgraded our Workload Automation. We went from 4.5.1 to 11.3.6. I think we did about an eight-year jump, in one fell swoop. It was nice to be able to help work with their teams to architect this solution in our upgrade, where we actually brought in our business needs. It wasn't just, “Hey, we're just going to replace it and move it forward.” That’s kind of like what we did, because we wanted to keep the solution as transparent to the end users that use it. We worked with the company and came up with something that makes sense for us.

Based on my experience, make sure you ask a lot of questions and advocate for what your business needs are. When you get your solution, investigate it. Don't just say, like CA, like any other vendor says, "This product can do x, y and z." Don't take that at face value. Ask the right questions, because I find that in technology, especially what I experience, when people talk about what my needs are and what my product can do, sometimes they're using the same words with different meanings based on the perception of the user or the context of the conversation.

I'm thinking, be clear, especially if you're on the technical piece. If you're going to be supporting this, ask a lot of questions, because what I found is, after the implementation of this product, it's kind of hard to go back and re-architect it and things like that. Advocate for yourself, but it's a fine product. I advocate for it all the time to everybody, because it does what it needs to do.

I think that the product has so many moving parts and so many features that it's a plethora of great stuff, whether it gets implemented for a specific vendor really depends on the vendor’s needs. I think it's a fabulous product that you can really fine tune for what your specific business needs are. It's scalable, it can grow. You don't have to worry about re-buying a hundred different things.

To me, if you do it right, it's very easy to manage, which is great. My team that I work with, we've been working with this product for eight years now and we were talking about it and somebody says, "The great thing about this product is, when there's an issue, you don't have to worry about picking up all the pieces and figuring out what happened." The system kind of comes back online, makes the reports that you need.