Control-M Reviews

Relatively small setup for ETL jobs only. We do not use Control-M for enterprise-wide scheduling and automation.

• Job scheduling for our ETL batch jobs has become streamlined and more efficient. 
• We are now able to deliver data to our data warehouses and dashboards promptly.

• There is a wide range of connectors. 
• Ability to handle files remotely through the advanced file transfer feature.

• A smartphone interface would be welcome. 
• Finding documentation on the website can be a bit confusing.

I think the administration part is much more valuable than any other feature. I don’t really remember the commands though, but working on the server is better than the GUI.

The project that I am working on is a banking project and a valuable customer to my organization; we get high revenue from it, hence the environment is very critical.

BMC keeps on improving this solution; there are many levels of improvement, customers can actually try the free trial version and provide feedback accordingly.

I have been using Control-M for the past four and a half years.

The product is stable, but in our environment, due to the huge amount of data, the product is a little slow.

We did encounter a few scalability issues. Sometimes, there are too many jobs in our environment on different servers, but that’s not the tool issue, we can simply increase the FS size. However, that requires bank cost; hence the scalability issue.

The technical support is good, I would rate it a three out of five.

Previously, I have used network and server monitoring for one and a half years; it was migrating to a different tool so I switched.

The setup was straightforward, i.e, in terms of CA NSM.

It’s a good, easy to use, and automated product. It is already used in every organization.

The GUI for operators.

Scheduling has changed from basic to more complex as our developers get acquainted with the ability and flexibility of the product.

Report builder is cumbersome. Not all interfaces work out-of-the-box and there are a lot of adjustments to the product and configurations after installation.

We have used this solution for three years.

Connectivity to agents is a constant challenge due to security and Firewalls.

There were no stability issues.

There were no scalability issues.

Customer support is good. The support site, searching, and accessing knowledge modules, and accessing product downloads is very slow.

Technical support is excellent.

We were a manual shop, where operators ran selected routines through menus.

We had do perform several install configurations until we finally achieved the stability we required.

We work with a vendor group and they were very good. The BMC support contributions for design were flawed and we had to make several adjustments.

I am not sure.

There are various methods available for licensing, and we use the task/day load process.

We evaluated Compugen, CA, and Cisco.

• User friendly interface
• Self-service portal
• Support for AS400 and mainframes
• many more.

Not all central scheduler tools have agents for iSeries, z/OS and UNISYS 2000. These are valuable features because I don't have to use many tools and I have one central tool for all platforms.

Reduces cost, failure, and human error.

I would like to see a decrease is the licensing price.

We have been using this for eight years. (Versions 6.4, 7, and 8.)

I did not encounter any issues with stability.

I did not encounter any issues with scalability

Technical support has a very weak first line of support, but a very good developer team in Israel.

I didn’t use a previous solution, but I saw and compared it with OpsWise, TWS and AutoSys.

It's like comparing iPhones (Control-M) with other phones (OpsWise, TWS and AutoSys).

Control-M has the best and most user friendly interface. It's very easy to use when you are just beginning your journey with central schedulers.

There are many features like modules for VMware, Hadoop, BladeLogic, databases, PeopleSoft, SAP and many more.

The installation was quite simple. There was very good documentation.

The licensing is quite expensive.

We evaluated OpsWise, TWS, and AutoSys.

Make sure you plan well when you begin automating jobs in Control-M.

It is primarily for batch job automation. It's working just fine.

It has certainly evolved over time. The latest versions have much better dashboarding and we can see what's happening. That is a significant improvement.

The automation of the batch jobs.

I would like to see automatic license management. And probably more importantly, some kind of machine learning to help identify the optimum automation path.

It's very stable.

It's as scalable as we've required. We haven't seen any problem.

Your process, standards, and control libraries: It's really important to have an advanced strategy around how development is going to take place. If each team is doing their own thing, it's hard to manage it.

My most important criteria when selecting a vendor, in this case, since it's a mature product, would be ease of migration and, obviously, reduction in cost.

I rate it a nine out of 10. What would make it a 10 would be a reduction in the cost and, even more so, the intelligent automation. The ability to do some machine learning and dynamically reduce the amount of time that the automation is taking is more important than cost at this point.

I have used Control-M for batch recovery and job processing providing automation solutions for in-house IT teams and dependent businesses.

The flexibility to schedule the jobs on various OS level platforms. It works on agent-level architecture, hence the usability is enhanced. 

Control-M has been there on back of all automated work lists by providing consistency, timely execution, and removing chances of human errors. 

Currently, I am not using this tool due to change of my role duties. Hence, it is difficult for me to comment over this. Though the tool is very resource intensive and has a few levels of performance issues when compared with VM and physical servers. 

No.

No.

Technical support was not required much as we had total in-house solution consultants. Though, in times of need, BMC had their regular support SLAs to support us. 

Yes, considering our then and there needs setup was bit complex and time consuming. As it was quite obvious due to the huge organizational size.  

It was an all in-house IT setup.

The deployment agent in this version was the most attractive thing I have found -- it's fast and very useful to upgrade in one go.

Usually, we have to raise a change request with each application owner to upgrade agents -- which was very time consuming since we had to login and do the installation. Now it's all in one go.

Area of improvement would be if it could attach anything other than .txt files as output files.

It's been seven years now.

Few database errors.

No.

No.

Excellent -- 10/10.

Excellent -- 10/10.

No.

Straightforward.

In-house.

N/A.

Planning is important.

CA.

Control-M has a huge number of features and utilities that assist users in monitoring their schedules and developers to build schedules which interface with many technologies. Here are some that stand out:

• Cross-platform support: A Linux job can be dependent on a Windows job, which can be dependent on many other flavours of hardware/software. Your batch is therefore managed by a single tool, allowing you to monitor your entire flow.
• Great GUI: Easy to navigate. Customisable. Status at a glance.
• Automated error handling: Depending on the exit status of a process, automated actions can be defined that might circumvent the need to callout.
• Forecast utility: Particularly useful after making changes to a batch flow, to see what impact those changes will have.
• Reporting utility: Generate reports for the business to track batch performance, usage, and so on.
• Mobile App: Business users can track the progress of their own batch flow, on the go.
• Control Modules: These allow you to define jobs that interface with databases, SFTP, SAP, and so on, directly, via secure connection profiles.
• Too many great features to list; excellent product..

Increased batch performance.

Reporting in Control-M could use improvement.

Used Control-M for 10 years and version 9 for six months.

Not that I'm aware of.

Not that I'm aware of.

None.

BMC service was excellent.

Excellent.

Excellent product.