IBM Workload Automation Reviews

The TWS GUI was an excellent feature. Job monitoring and scheduling using the front end was extremely easy.

Job scheduling is an integral part of deploying data warehousing jobs. I was a part of the developer team and while coordinating with the support team who did the actual job scheduling, it was easy for them to coordinate with us on what job to release first, what to cancel, what to release dependencies, etc.

If there was a way to monitor SLA breaches from within TWS, it would have been great. The only way to monitor job failures on TWS was to check the GUI for any failed streams. This said, there are ticketing systems associated with batch and real-time jobs that triggered an alert whenever something failed and that works well with TWS.

The one scenario that I encountered (and found a solution to by implementing a script from outside of TWS) was when a critical job does not start running even after the scheduled time, say due to an unexpected outage on one of the dependencies listed on TWS, there was no way to alert the owners of the application. And no ticketing system would alert anyone because technically, there is no failure. Or there was no way to trigger an alert from within TWS for a long running job, that is running way past it’s ETA.

I used the solution for two years.

None that I encountered during my two-year tenure at Chase.

Deployments and issues with the TWS server were handled by a different team. Other than periodic maintenance outages, there was no other major downtime that I encountered.

Individual access setup was relatively easy. But I think I would attribute this to the setup teams, to the on-boarding team at Chase. We had a specialized request procedure and an access team handled the request.

Things shifted after I joined. They evaluated Control-M and decided to pursue Control-M and discontinue use of TWS. Control-M had a far superior user interface and also had a notification system which TWS lacked.

There are multiple factors that would influence my preference to this product. In purely ease of use, functionality etc, I would rate it 8/10. I am not considering the cost of license etc.