Fortra's JAMS Reviews

It is our enterprise job scheduler. Every batch job that runs in the company runs on JAMS. 

It helps save time when troubleshooting stalled jobs. It has full logging. You go into your single pane of glass, you see all your failed jobs, you click on the job, go straight to the log, and you see what has gone wrong. And if something fails in the middle of the night, with the targeted alerting it sends an email or an SMS and does all your on-call for you. We've been using it for so long that it's hard to say how much time it saves us. But it's probably fair to say it quite easily saved us a day a week, and even more. The time saved could easily be the equivalent of one FTE. And that, of course, allows that FTE to do other work that's beneficial to the company.

One of the most valuable features is the natural language selection. That means that when you are scheduling a job, you've got more flexibility than anything else I've ever come across in the industry. You can not only tell it to run something daily or on a specify a day of the week, but you can specify "the first Monday of the month," or "the second workday of the month," or "the second business day of the month," or "the last business day of the month," or "every other Tuesday." The flexibility in the scheduling is because of JAMS' natural language selection. It's better than anything else on the market that I've seen.

The ability to change jobs is the stock standard for a job scheduler, but JAMS has the ability to allocate resources. We mainly use that at a global level. If we are doing scheduled maintenance, for example, we can halt all jobs. We can set the resource level to zero and no jobs will run. That way, we don't have to go through turning off schedules. For maintenance windows, it makes life an absolute breeze.

The alerting in it is really targeted. You can set a hierarchy of jobs if you like. There is a global level, obviously. But underneath that, you can have folders. We set up those folders at a functional level within the business. For instance, we have a folder for our finance jobs, another for our compliance jobs, and another folder for our equities jobs. At that folder level, you can set specific alerting so that if jobs in a given folder fail, certain people are alerted. You can also set security at the folder level, so that only people in those areas can go set them. That means that the alerting and security can be set at a very granular level.

Another great feature is the full auditing capability. If anyone makes a change to a job, you can see who's changed it and when. That full auditing capability is huge for compliance. And you've got version control, as well. If you make a change to a job and it fails, all you have to do is revert back to the previous version and you're back in business.

In addition, it's built on .NET. If you're a Microsoft shop, PowerShell is exposed natively and seamlessly integrates with it, which is brilliant. We use an awful lot of PowerShell in our organization because we're a Microsoft shop.

But it can run agents on any operating system and it can run all types of jobs. The execution methods it has are amazing. It can run stored procedures, SQL Agent jobs, SSIS packages, batch jobs, Linux jobs, and Oracle. The number of execution methods is huge and it runs just about any type of job you would want to run, and on any platform, which is also huge.

JAMS is also very intuitive and easy to use. It doesn't take a lot of work to set up and get started with it. It integrates natively with Windows Workflow Foundation, so you can build quite complex workflows, with if-then-else structures, and you can run things in parallel or in sequence. It really is a very feature-rich product but it's also very easy to use.

In addition, it helps centralize the management of all jobs and all your platforms and applications. You have a single pane of glass where you're looking at everything. If your organization is big, you might have multiple administrators. In that case, you set security at whatever level you like and certain people can only look at certain jobs. In my case, because I'm effectively the administrator of it in our organization, I see everything. But that one pane of glass for a whole organization is its great strength.

The only thing that they could improve on is the fact that they don't have a browser version of JAMS. They've got all the bits and pieces there if you want to build your own web version of it. It does come with a web client, but it's pretty clunky. They could improve on that.

I have been using JAMS since 2009. I was the first in the Australasian region to implement it. We're currently using version 6.5, but we're in the process of upgrading to 7.3.

The stability is really good. They do have a failover solution, which we're not using. We are just using the standalone, with a single server, but with no problems at all. We have never missed a beat.

We haven't had a problem scaling up. We have over 2,000 individual jobs, and we run 25,000 instances of those jobs every day. We plan to increase our usage as this is the only solution that runs jobs in our company.

All of IT uses it to schedule our jobs. And because of the security aspects, we make ad hoc jobs available to end-users as well. They can go in and all they're able to see, and run, only their ad hoc job. So about 50 out of the 350 people in our organization are using it.

The support is terrific. I've been working with these guys for 12 years and, as often as not, they've come across every problem that I've come across. I'll say, "Oh, listen, I've got this problem," and they'll say, "Here's a piece of code you can run. Here's an example where one of our other clients has done it before and we helped them do it." The support is brilliant; really good.

Positive

When I started with this company, they didn't have JAMS. Because I'd used it at a different company, the first thing I did when I got here was to say, "We're putting this in," and they did. They were running jobs via SQL Agent, as well as Windows Tasks Scheduler, SQL Server Reporting Services schedule, via Linux cron, and someone had even built an in-house job scheduler. Back then, when a job failed, remediating it was an absolute nightmare because nothing was synchronized. There were no dependencies on any of the jobs.

All the monitoring was done manually before, in our organization. Any company of a certain size should have an enterprise job scheduler. If you don't, you're just kidding yourself. You are making a rod for your own back, because someone has to monitor things, whether it's SQL Agent or Window Task Scheduler, to make sure the jobs are all working properly. Because it was manual, things would get missed and it was a nightmare.

The initial setup of JAMS was very straightforward. It was really good and their support staff was terrific in helping with that as well.

You get it up and running in a day, if you've got your servers built. It's a matter of provisioning a server, making sure you've got your service account set up, database ready to go or your database server provisioned. As long as you've got all the bits and pieces, you could be up and running in an hour, really.

ROI is hard to quantify. But whereas in the past we might have had one or more people monitoring batches and remediating failed batches, JAMS does all that now. It frees up one or two people. It's been an absolute no-brainer for us. It's worth its weight in gold and we cannot get rid of it now.

There was a price hike recently, which makes it a lot more expensive than what we are currently paying for it. You can do an enterprise license, which is probably the best value. But it's certainly a lot cheaper than Tivoli and Control-M. In comparison to them, you get a lot more bang for your buck. You get pretty much the whole functionality and more, in some cases, when compared to Control-M, but at a fraction of the price.

Before coming across JAMS, I had worked in bigger organizations that used Tivoli and Control-M. They are what I would call your "Tier One" solutions. Very big companies use them, although I don't know why they do, given that they're super expensive. Both of them are very feature-rich products, but in addition to being very expensive, they're very complex to set up. They also require a very heavy touch to maintain and administer. JAMS is easier to set up, much cheaper, and much easier to administer. 

There's another product called ActiveBatch, which is what I would call "Tier Two," because it's not as expensive as Tivoli and Control-M. ActiveBatch is in the same category as JAMS, price-wise. It has a nice drag-and-drop interface, which is something that JAMS doesn't have, but it's a lot more complex to use and not as intuitive.

Give it a go. Compare it to everything else on the market and, in terms of bang for your buck and the features you get, I would be very surprised if anything even comes close to JAMS.

You put an agent on every box that you want to run a job on. It's not agentless. But, as I said, you can put an agent on a Linux box or a Windows box or whatever other type of box you have and run jobs on any type of OS.

JAMS stays well ahead of the curve. I've been using it for 12 years and I still love it. I've recommended it at every company I've worked for.

The initial use case is that we use it to centralize everything, including all jobs from across different environments. Our goal is to be able to do all of the maintenance centrally.

When our jobs run, our team handles the jobs and they are not assigned to other teams. The output, which is on the backend and put into the database, is available for everyone.

JAMS helps us to deal with the small issues that come up here and there because we implement notifications for jobs. Whenever a job fails, it sends a notification and most of the time, there is a setting in the configuration that has to be changed. We have JAMS configured in a data-driven setup.

Whenever a job runs, it reads the configuration settings that are specific to it. If ever there is an issue, it's typically because we have the wrong configuration. In cases like this, we tweak the configuration and then somebody runs the job again by right-clicking on it.

We have JAMS set up so that we are running two interactive agents. One is a scheduler and the other is exclusive for SSIS execution. These are important to us and without them, it's going to negatively affect the business.

The way that we implemented and use JAMS is in a centralized configuration. We don't have people running jobs on their desktop because it would mean that we don't have visibility of it. Instead, everything has been migrated to JAMS so that it can run centrally. If anybody needs to run a job or perform any execution, especially for production, they can do so in JAMS. Later, we can look and see who ran what jobs at what times, and if ever there is a modification then we will know who modified it.

JAMS is able to handle exceptions in different ways. The way that we have it configured is to notify us. The process may be retried several times and we can set the limit for this. We also configure what the delay is between retries. It will depend on the use case and how long it takes. However, if it fails then it has to notify another group so that they can take a look at what the exception was.

We have a job that is similar to a report subscription, and this is done for each of our 50 partners. Prior to JAMS, we were required to run 50 different jobs. As it is now, given that JAMS is data-driven, we have only created a single job. It is written as a workflow with those configuration items. We don't need to change the job or add to it. Instead, it reads the configuration table and runs the 50 processes right away.

If there is a process that needs to be disabled then we do so in the configuration table, and the workflow picks up the changes. Having a single job taking care of the 50 processes makes the system more flexible.

JAMS helps free up time for our IT staff because it's centralized and the logging is there. The time that IT spends troubleshooting a job has been significantly reduced. The amount of time it saves varies on a case-by-case basis. For a more complex job, it can save more time. If we consider SSIS, it has its own logging capabilities but it requires that somebody with the right permissions go in and open the logs. Not everybody has permission for that, so the job depends on perhaps a single person. Often, that person has several responsibilities and other things to do, so the task can take longer to complete. JAMS collects all of the relevant logs, and having them centralized means that several people can view them, rather than only those with that application-specific set of permissions. This is one of the reasons that it saves us time.

The most valuable feature for us is that it's DR-ready. With respect to disaster recovery, it has the built-in capability for failover to our DR site. If all of the required ports are open, it can be done seamlessly.

We test the disaster recovery capability every now and then because it is important for us to be able to failover to another site. As long as that works, if we have a problem then it's business as usual. A problem doesn't impede our work because there's no interruption in the service.

Writing the JAMS schedule is nice because we can use natural language in English. For example, we can specify days by writing "the first of March" or "the second of March". It's clear. Being able to specify the schedule in this way is good.

JAMS saves us time when it comes to troubleshooting stalled jobs because of the logging that it provides. It allows us to go to the execution history, look at the log, and find the problem. Even if the log is very large, it provides a path for us to follow and find what we need to look at. We can typically solve issues in an hour or less because of the logging.

The PowerShell integration is great. When there are things that we couldn't do out of the box, they have execution methods that we can use in PowerShell that make things more flexible for us.

The search capability needs to be improved because when we try to search for a job, it's hard to do. We have to know where it is. This is really the functionality that I think is lacking.

We have been using JAMS for approximately three years.

JAMS is a pretty stable solution that handles the resources very well. 

This product is highly scalable.

We have two people on the administration side and another ten people who are working with it. They are using it as part of their support role with the helpdesk. We also have a developer that creates the jobs, which are then scheduled by JAMS.

We will probably increase our usage in the future. Right now, we're implementing the web client of JAMS. When we get to the point that we are fully using it, including the web component, then that may be the time for us to look into expanding our usage. At this point, we want to be able to maximize the use of JAMS, and so far, it seems that there's a lot to JAMS that we haven't really used yet.

I would rate the support very high.

First, the response time is very good. When we engage the support engineers, they always know what to provide us with so that we can figure out what's wrong. Whenever we need to go to meetings, it's always a learning experience. They're very smart.

JAMS did not replace other monitoring tools and it was able to solve the problem that we had.

I was not the person that initially set up JAMS. It's not complex but that person didn't follow the procedure fully. When I took over the implementation and setup, JAMS provided a checklist. It was good because I was able to follow each of the steps. From what I can tell, in the initial setup, we didn't follow it to a tee, and this caused some complexity on our end.

The deployment took about a year in total, although in a typical situation, I think that two weeks would be enough time to implement it. Depending on how much work needs to be done, it may take a month to complete.

In our team, we have a two-week scrum process and it would be quicker for us to do. Our security and infrastructure are also different than it is in the rest of the organization. For example, we can set up our own VM, database, and scheduler if they are not already set up.

JAMS provides a list of the best practices with regard to security. 

We have two people in-house that are responsible for maintenance.

There are a lot of features in JAMS that we haven't used yet. For example, there is a special calendar and we haven't even tried to utilize it. However, we would like to eventually use it to its full potential.

In summary, this product is top class. I would like to commend all of the engineers and support team at JAMS, and I highly recommend it to others.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We use the solution for workflow automation.

The planning capabilities are most valuable. Additionally, it is very easy to use and is efficient.

In the future, it would be beneficial to have more integration.

There could be a better simulation for banning the termination. You have to simulate every one of the processes in order to have an idea for better planning. This kind of simulation is broken and needs improvement.

I have been using the solutions for approximately five years.

Most of our clients are large businesses and they use the solution daily.

The support we have received has been very good.

I have evaluated Gems and Control M in the past.

I recommend this solution to others.

I rate HelpSystems Automate Schedule an eight out of ten.