We performed a comparison between Automic Workload Automation, IBM Workload Automation, and Rocket Zena based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about BMC, Tidal Software by Redwood, Redwood Software and others in Workload Automation."It is scalable. We can grow it out."
"We have a lot of governance and compliance requirements as a bank that we can fulfill with this product."
"The Zero Upgrade feature is the most valuable."
"The ability to be able to automate more of our business processes."
"The most valuable features are its robustness, it's highly scalable, and it's easy to implement."
"It enables us to build automation which is flexible in a controlled environment."
"Without automation, it would be nearly impossible to do all the jobs that we are doing."
"Stability has been great. My team, we call ourselves "the invisibles" because things run so well that sometimes you almost feel like you have to try to break something to actually get acknowledged."
"Provides a robust, full spectrum enterprise-wide WLA platform."
"This solution has a request feature where users can request the added features they need to have developed. Based on client voting for those features, these are developed and released."
"The project we worked on involved the running of nearly 24,000 job instances in a single day, so I would say that the solution is stable."
"Technical support from IBM is very good."
"The initial setup is easy."
"The technical support is great, the product is easy-to-use, and it is stable."
"The whole product is valuable because it is a tool for batch automation."
"The DWC, when configured correctly, is a great GUI tool to provide Self-Service Scheduling capabilities to the user community."
"Its FTP feature is very good, as is scheduling any process or task with the Zena client. I have found it to be very helpful. If a task fails, it gives you a prompt."
"You can click Ctrl-G and bring a diagram view. You're able to view in a diagram format. The view that it provides is easy, and you can move to the left, up, or down. You can double-click on a certain process. It'll drill into that process and all of its underlying components. You can double-click on an arrow or a component, and it'll bring up a screen that'll have all the variables that are assigned to that particular piece, as well as the values at run time. So, the diagram feature of it, at least for me, is pretty valuable."
"From a Linux configuration point of view, Rocket Zena is straightforward. It's fairly easy to set up the server and agents once you know how to do it."
"I have used other tools with similar capabilities; it's the ease of use."
"The most valuable feature is the FTP file transfer."
"I like the whole product, but specifically, I like the license part. It's very easy to acquire a license for this product."
"I have found the scheduling feature the most valuable. I can map dependencies by using ASG-Zena. It gives a nice, quick visualization as to where things are."
"In the latest upgrade, Zena added a web-based client. The more I use it, the more I like it. It's an excellent interface. They do a good job of steadily improving the solution to make it more useful."
"In terms of what can be improved, we are in Israel, so we work in Hebrew. Now they are starting to move it also from English to Hebrew and to support the language, but for us it has been very difficult because the Hebrew looks like gibberish. So there are language issues."
"The hotline can take a long time. They will say, "I will take it and give it to the Level 2 support.""
"When you want to use the entirety of Automic, it is heavy."
"When there's an error or a problem, the automation part of it could be easily programmed to escalate it up to the developers or whoever is going to work on it. We had to home-grow that within the product because third-party products are so expensive."
"For power users, it does not work well for them at the moment."
"After the merger, it is getting more American. Now, they do not have support in French and have limited German documentation. This is a critical problem for companies who have older generations who did not have English in school."
"I hope going forward they will make some changes to the documentation. I hope they will write into the documentation what has changed and what the new names are. For example, some features have a new name. I hope they will make a translation the names in the old version to the names in the newer version."
"From my point of view, the current product needs more stability."
"It is missing some features and can improve in areas where the competition is somewhat better like linking job dependencies."
"This solution does have bugs and could be improved in this regard. However, these bugs are resolved relatively quickly."
"The configuration of IBM Workload Automation has some challenges. We have a difficult time customizing it, but it is similar to other solutions."
"Slow down on the releases a bit. I fully understand that IWA functionality is increasing at an amazing rate, but trying to keep up with the upgrades is rough."
"The schedule refreshes daily and that's a challenge for us."
"Scalability-wise, it can be a little bit challenging."
"It would be helpful to have a mobile app that could be used to follow the job schedule."
"There should be more custom documentation, specifically around Java APIs. There should also be more training. In terms of features, we are currently using only 50% of its features. We don't use all features that are available, but there is always room for improvement in all of the tools."
"In the next release, I would like to have an alert feature to indicate when an agent is down. Rocket Zena is not capable of sending alerts that the agent is down. As of now, you have manually monitor to see when the agent is down."
"The UI is not intuitive, and it would be nice if there was a web interface."
"One area where it could be improved is communication between the different servers. Sometimes there are processes that have already been completed but we get a status notification that they're still active."
"In the web interface, it stacks the tasks across the top, and they accumulate until you close or clean those out. That seems a little cumbersome. You must right-click and close all tabs constantly to keep the console clean and manage your views."
"The scheduling mapping is a little disjointed. There is no wizard-type approach. There are a lot of different things that you have to do in completely different areas. They could probably add the functionality for creating all components of a mapping or an OPA schedule. The component creation could be done collectively rather than through individual components."
"The documentation has room for improvement."
"Rocket Zena is a mainframe-based job scheduler. I would like it to be more open so that we can use it on a distributed platform."
"Another one that is probably a little bit bigger for me is that when there is an issue or there's an error, it writes on a different screen. I have to find the actual process name and go to a different screen to view the alert that got generated. On that screen, everyone's processes, not just the processes of the folks in my department, are thrown. It takes me a while to find the actual error so that I could go in there and look at the alert. It could be because of the way it was set up, but at least for me, it isn't too intuitive."
