AutoSys Workload Automation Reviews

Without this product we would have to manually submit jobs and it would take longer. There would also be a much greater possibility of jobs running wrong and/or not at the right time.

The scheduling feature allows us to know when jobs are going to run and makes sure they run in the order needed.

Because this product only computes processing days, it is hard when things need to be scheduled according to non-processing days. 

Some of the reports are either a bit hard to understand or don’t give you what you might expect to see.

No issues.

No issues.

Tech support is excellent, especially if you have a problem that gets bumped to level-two people. The level-two people are great at figuring out what happened and what you do next.

We switched from Burroughs to IBM, previously.

Complex, but we have a complex schedule.

I’m not involved in this aspect.

Yes, IBM’s solution.

Get on the community. Ask questions.

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.

A strong aspect of our current use case is to provide integration with the Zeke mainframe scheduler and enable cross platform job dependencies between the two worlds.

Self-Service can enable the support team to move from being a bottleneck to being the go-to team for expertise and advice and to focus on maintaining the infrastructure.

Granular Security enables self-service role-based access. JIL language is always a big accelerator for creating/editing job flows efficiently.

Great at handling timezones and daylight savings adjustments.

Despite the commitment of the development team to improve the UI since version 11.3, the WCC module still lacks true quality. There are still too many screens and the use cases need to be handled in a more "compact" way. I have not seen the v12 product yet.

Note that this product is now a legacy product with a dwindling user base and support.

Do not consider for a green site implementation

We've been using v11.3.6 for years, and the tool in general since 2006.

We've had no issues with the stability.

We've had no trouble scaling it for our needs.

Customer Service:

The user conference used to be a great way to catch the attention of the development and product management team. Sadly, these are a thing of the past.

Technical Support:

Technical support has noticeably gone down since the Broadcom takeover of CA. A lot of the knowledge base is now on line and the expectation is that users self-support with that. The level of depth that the support organisation provides is not as deep as previously. We have not experienced any emergency situations though, so can't comment on that.

The initial setup was not hugely complicated, but do set aside four to six man-months if you are not using specialist services. The product does require some careful thinking around the High Availability and security sides. Thorough qualifications testing is recommended for a scheduler, too.

If you don't buy competence, you will need to build it internally which takes time. The recent versions of the product are a lot more complex than the relatively simple 4.0.

Legacy product with dwindling user base and support.

Get some specialist help if you don't have internal knowledge.

This product is now legacy.

We have used batch job scheduling and ad-hoc jobs in DEV, QA, UAT, PREPROD, and production for tier-one sensitive applications.

It helped us to avoid manual error. It helped us to reduce the manual efforts also. Helped us by giving alerts for long running jobs.

Virtual machine usage: It helped us to schedule the job to run on multiple servers based on the workload. It is automatically taking care of workload balance based on configuration settings.

Calendar usage is also very useful. It allows us to use our own calendar.

• It needs improvement in the high-availability side.
• It needs improvement in WCC console and EEM console to make it user-friendly.

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.

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.

• 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.

In our case, it's just managing the day and night jobs of banks because we are supporting several banks in Europe.

The company I'm working for is an outsourcing company who provides solutions for customers. We host their complete environment.

The features that I have found most valuable with AutoSys are that it is scalable, easy to use, fast, and always available. That's very important because if it's not steady then it's a real problem. So, at this point, we are satisfied with it.

If you do not need the latest features like cloud and compare, I would really advise using AutoSys. For future technologies, I cannot answer the question yet.

In terms of what should be in the next release, I want integration and AI and so on. I'd like easy reporting where you can compare information, for example, "that job normally takes three minutes and last time it took six minutes or 10 minutes." Then you can get the information to the engineer of which job is taking more time than normal - understanding strange behavior compared to the baseline.

I have been using AutoSys Workload Automation for nine years.

We are not using the latest version. We are planning a migration towards the latest version or a migration to another tool. Most likely, because of the lifetime of the environment that has to be supported, we will probably migrate to the latest version because it's often easier if you stay with the same product.

We have several customers at this moment and AutoSys is used by one bank. In fact, it's not like real end-users are touching the tool. It is doing its job during the night and it is only for one application including the bank application, so it's not connected to its final end users, so you scale all the toolings which are available in the bank environment. We only focus on the core banking.

The technical support is very good. If you open a case, the support is really sufficient.

AutoSys Workload Automation is really easy to install. You can install the server and an agent in about 10 minutes. It takes the agent on five clicks. Even if you have many agents to install during installation, you can pick that very easily and you also can deploy it fairly easily. In terms of the deployment, it's a nice solution.

Normally you can do it by yourself unless you're running into situations where the newest version is working slightly differently than the previous version. Sometimes you need to adopt some parameters, but they provide you sufficient support for that. The deployment can be done by one guy. One system engineer can handle the job.

AutoSys Workload Automation has a yearly subscription.

On a scale of one to ten, for the part that we are currently using, I can give AutoSys Workload Automation an eight.

I would recommend this product for other users who want to start using it depending on their needs. I'm still investigating what the new version provides in the future, based on technology, so it is difficult to answer that question.