CA Process Automation Reviews

There are several valuable features--

• The ability to tie together many systems; overall orchestration of these systems.
• The ability to troubleshoot problem workflows in the middle of execution.
• We use PA for right-sizing VMs, so changing CPU and memory sizes. If for some reason we can’t connect to it or the VM is set in a certain way where it’s resource limited, it’ll allow us to troubleshoot it instead of failing.

It gives us predictability in terms of our use of the solution becuase we can standardize our implementations. That means we can implement more quickly with fewer resources in a process that has been fleshed out over time.

I'd like to see additional form functionality and having Python as an available common script language.

It’s been very stable. At one time we had some issues in a load-balanced environment, but those have since been corrected.

The way we have to interact with Linux machines has been a challenge, but that’s mainly due to how we’ve configured our environment rather than a limitation of the solution.

They’ve been very responsive. They were able to provide a quick solution to my issue and were able to get it resolved.

We were implementing some new functionality that used PA forms – the forms weren’t reading in the data as one would expect. We contacted support and they identified that the issue had been reported previously, they were able to give us the solution, and we corrected it. This happened over about a half day.

It was already in production when I joined the company.

For our use it really does very well. It provides us exactly what we need, and it runs with low-resource utilization and moves quickly. As the product matures it will only get better.

Consider troubleshooting needs for workflows – how do you want those to be handled? The types of integrations you need – VMware, RedHat, and Windows, to be specific. Consider also your security needs, especially any LDAP or authentication integration requirements.

It’s a simple interface to be able to automate our process as needed. It gives us the ability to go into the workflow that had halted for any reason, to research the issue, fix the problem, and continue the workflow. If you’re 600 servers into a 900-server workflow, you don’t have to restart the whole thing.

We took our server provisioning process from about 30 days to about 4 days on the first iteration of implementation. That was in 2012. Now we’ve got provisioning a stack of servers in about 2 hours. We’ve automated probably 15 or 20 manual processes that run on a regular schedule.

Better reporting, because we have to true up our licenses every three months because we license on running concurrent processes, so we have to provide a report to CA every three months using their tool -- which never works.

From a usability point of view, I’d like to see improvement on their script editor so I don’t have to use two tools to generate scripts (right now I develop outside of the tool, bring it into the tool, tweak it, and roll out my workflow).

Very satisfied. Mostly database issues – periodically locked transaction, and then the product goes down and processes don’t run. We haven’t seen that in seven or eight months which might be a result of upgrading to 4.2.1.

We haven’t had to scale it out much, but when we do it’s pretty easy.

They’re always good – it’s a non-issue.

When we upgraded EEM from 8.x to 12.x there was an issue that was not documented; that left us behind a little bit on our update. They gave us a workaround which they knew existed, but the problem was really with the documentation – when we prepped for the upgrade it wasn’t documented and some of the screens didn’t match up, and it wasn’t due to our infrastructure. It was due to a known but non-documented issue with CA.

Management had adopted an “automate everything” attitude and rolled it down to us, so we had to come up with a solution.

We built out the architecture. The initial setup was complex in the context of our environment at the time. Pulling in the right people from networking to get the load balancing correct. CA was there by our side the whole time – if we needed them they were very helpful. In our test environment, CA spent a week with us on-site just to teach us how to use the product. Once we got it in place, they’ve been there right along.

We were looking for a vendor who offered support and a good product. That’s it. We looked at IBM, HP, and Microsoft. The workflow management was the reason we went with CA.

Support, usability, functionality are good. There’s always room for improvement. Make sure you know what it is that you want and don’t back down from those points as you do a POC or an evaluation.

We have a slogan at my company: PAM can do everything.

What I like about it is the user interfaces. I also like the fact that there are so many ways that they offer it -- Web Service connectors, Service Desk connectors, and job descriptions that allow you to build around your design.

PAM is a very powerful tool.

I don't feel like there's a a problem we can't solve if we have to go outside the native product that we are dealing with, whether that's Service Desk or Catalog. If there's something we can't do in those natively, we can always find a way to do it with PAM.

I can really see ourselves using PAM purely in the stand alone environment. We are using it to integrate all the different products that we have with CA. I can see it being used even if we were using other third-party products like Remedy.

PAM has the ability to integrate and build solutions that work well in CA's suite of service management products and those that are outside of service management.

I'd like to be able to do a deep dive into understanding how the engine works a little bit better, so that whenever I get called by an angry user about why something is taking so long, I'd like to be able to look through the logs like a developer would. I'm sure they could do a deep dive if I ever was able to engage them. The ability to do a deep dive would allow me to explain why something got hung up with in the process or explain how I can recover from a slow process.

No issues with deployment.

We have an advanced environment that is tolerant to failures. I think it holds up very well considering all the processing and all the challenges it has to deal with day to day.

We haven't had to expand on the original environment that we stood up. We haven't really had to grow from the original configuration. We've built an environment that offers load balancing and full tolerance.

They are very knowledgeable. Most of my issues with PAM have been format-related like trying to account for a spike processes that might not have executed as fast as I thought it should execute. Those are intricate tickets to get resolved. A lot of times they don't get resolved, but I'm okay with those kind of responses sometimes.

It was easy.

Make sure you have a good background in scripting because it'll allow you to expand the scope of how you use PAM.

I would also suggest you to set the advanced availability configuration which gives you full tolerance and load balancing. It definitely pays off, especially if your PAM environment needs to be up 24/7.

We're just getting into PAM and we don't have many processes in there, but I have plenty of ideas on what I want to do with it. But what I've used of it, I've seen that the value lies in just being able to automate things such that there's less human interaction with it and, therefore, more consistency in our automations.

We're required to engage with less human interaction for the processes. It takes the errors out and makes it more consistent. It's simple for our team to use because you only need to drag-and-drop connections.

I don't use it enough to be able to speak to it right now. But, I'd say that, although it's drag-and-drop, there's a little bit of a learning curve to use it correctly.

I didn't deploy it, but did not hear any complaints about issues.

I've had no issues with stability.

We are not really using it enough for me to speak to it, but it seems very scalable.

I haven't had to log any tickets for it with technical support.

I wasn't involved in the setup, so I can't say whether it was straightforward or complex.

I really just started using it a few months ago, so it's hard for me to provide any advice. I will say that the automation is nice and that it allows you the simplicity of just dragging things in and connecting them.