JAMS Reviews

We use it to schedule batch jobs. Batch jobs are a combination of SSIS jobs, which is actually our group's main use case. I brought it in mostly to schedule our SSIS batch jobs. Then, there are other groups who are using it for SQL Server stored procedures. We also have another group using it for a few Python scripts and FME, which is a different type of ETL tool. So, we are using JAMS to schedule those four types of jobs as well as a bunch of FTP jobs.

The application developers have been doing a combination of migrating some of their older jobs, like Python scripts and SQL stored procedures, and FME jobs over to JAMS. Any new batch jobs that they are creating default to using JAMS. They mostly do interactive online type applications. However, on occasions where they do need batch processes, they just use JAMS.

The fact that we no longer need to use Excel spreadsheets is huge. Before JAMS, every group was keeping track of their own batch jobs. Nobody really knew what the other jobs were. So, if jobs failed, other groups wouldn't necessarily know. With JAMS, everything is done through a single scheduler. You can choose who to notify. 

The ability to work out dependencies between jobs is the most valuable feature, which is actually the main reason why we went with JAMS. We went from everybody trying to keep track of stuff on Excel spreadsheets to being able to see things graphically, and say, "This job should not continue or start unless another job begins." That is very useful. Plus, we have a bunch of jobs that are using File Watchers. So, the job doesn't start up until a file is put on a shared drive, which is the automation that JAMS provides that the old SQL Server agent did not do at all.

It provides notifications. 

The fact that JAMS provides metrics is actually nice, although this feature is not really used that much. Before it was a lot harder to get metrics, whereas there are now metrics if we want them.

The client needs a complete revamp as it is not the most intuitive of methods of setting up jobs.    We have encountered situations like options disappearing and with no obvious way of getting it back, we have had to open up a Support ticket just to figure out how to get the missing options back

I have been using it for around three years.

We are about two versions behind. Our upgrades are done by our infrastructure team. We decided that to reduce the amount of work for them that we were going to limit upgrades to approximately every six months, because JAMS does frequently update their software. For the most part, it is fairly stable. We have basically worked out with our infrastructure team to not update every time a new version is released. So, it is done around twice a year.

The product is quite stable and we haven't run into any major issues.

Our infrastructure is pretty straightforward. It is just SQL Server jobs. It works fine on all our Windows machines. We might be exploring a Linux machine for scheduling a SQL Database job, but we haven't done that yet. 

The plan is to have all our batch jobs managed by JAMS. For various reasons, mostly related to strange quirks, they weren't able to just migrate every single thing to JAMS, but that is the end goal. We want to have a single scheduling tool that manages all our batch jobs.

We haven't really encountered any scalability issues. Most of our jobs run at night. We have a bunch of daily jobs that run every half an hour. Therefore, it has not been a huge strain on the JAM server.

There are not that many users of JAMS, probably five or six. We have one administrator who is part of our infrastructure team who can configure JAMS etc., but acts in more of an implementer role. He was the one who installed the software. Setting up jobs and things like that is left up to my group. There are two people in my group who have permission to create and submit jobs. Then, we have about three or four inquirers who look at the output of the jobs, but don't have the permissions to submit jobs.

Reach out to their support, because they're support is really good.

I would give HelpSystems IT support a nine out of 10, which is really good. I have been very impressed with their support. The only reason for a nine out of 10 is sometimes it takes at least a day for them to get back to me, which isn't really that big a deal. However, for the most part, if we do it within U.S.A. working hours, then I get a response pretty quickly. Also, after hours, I think I have sometimes gotten their London support.

We have had situations where we would hide things and could never figure out how to actually get things back. We would inadvertently just hide things without even knowing that we hid them, then we literally have to reach out to JAMS support. As far as kudos, JAMS support is excellent. They are very responsive. There have been little things like, "We lost a window. How do we get that back?" The fact that you had to hover over a specific area of the UI, then depending on where you hovered, you could get that particular window pane back. That was the first thing that we ran into, because it was like, "We lost this. How do we get this back?" 

I actually was the one who brought the product in. My group was looking for a scheduling tool. Until I arrived, everybody was just using the built-in scheduler, which was fine, but it was impossible to look at things practically or even determine dependencies. So, everybody was just using spreadsheets, but I hadn't. The place I came from, which was the private sector, had money. They were using a full-fledged scheduling software, Control-M, which was really expensive. When I came to San Francisco Public Works, they didn't have it. Therefore, I started looking around to see what was available. 

Previously, we were using SQL Server Agent. Migrating these has been going well. One of the great advantages of JAMS is it can just convert SQL Server Agent jobs directly, which is not ideal because you are still running SQL Server Agent. This is one reason why we are doing things slowly. We are decomposing the SQL Server Agent jobs into steps and scheduling those, rather than running SQL Server Agent jobs.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. We just followed the instructions that were on the webpage. So, on the actual JAMS site, there are steps you need to follow if you are installing JAMS. We just followed them and pretty much everything worked. 

The deployment took less than an hour. It was pretty quick.

We went from nothing. We just deployed all the new tasks first. So, all of the SSIS jobs that my group had built. These were all new. We didn't really have anything to convert because it was already there. That was the initial phase. That is why it was pretty quick. Once we were comfortable using it, we started to expand the use of JAMS to start converting some of the SQL Server agent jobs into JAMS.

We migrated from an on-prem JAMS to an Azure VM JAMS. So, we actually did a migration, which also involved an upgrade in the process. There was a time when we hadn't upgraded JAMS for over a year, so we were way behind. What we were told by JAMS support is to upgrade our JAMS first, then redeploy it on an Azure VM, and that went without a hitch. I was quite surprised and impressed by how easy it was. Support also said, "If you need us, we can be on the line." We scheduled some time with them, but we never really used them.

We installed the Interactive Agents once. There was an odd case where we were trying to automate a Microsoft Access script or something, which required the Interactive Agent to be installed. This took awhile because of permissions and things like that. Once it was working, it just worked like any other JAMS job. The only hassle was setting it up. We were a bit confused by the documentation. This was at least six months back, but it had something to do with the instructions not being entirely clear as to what types of authentication we had to set up. We reached out to JAMS support, and they said, "Do this." Once we did that, it worked. That was really our only exposure to the Interactive Agents.

We did it all ourselves.

It has been a while since we installed it, but we might have had someone on the line. They actually said, "If you want, we can be on the line." We might have used that, but I don't think we really needed them because it was just click, click, click, and follow the instructions.

We have an infrastructure group, but deployment for JAMS usually defaults to a single person, since he was the one who installed it in the first place. So, he has the most "knowledge" for upgrading patches.

We haven't had the requirement to go beyond our number of licenses. The way that the license is set up, we are allowed a certain number of jobs a day. That is the license that we have, which is more than enough. 

It was $10,000 for the first year. Then, there is a maintenance cost for licensing every year that we get billed $5,000 for every year.

The way that the license is set up = it will allow you to 350 jobs a day. You can install the agent on as many machines as you want, but you can only run 350 jobs a day. Then, if you want more, you pay for more.

I looked at VisualCron. The reason why I picked JAMS over VisualCron was that JAMS got back to me very quickly. VisualCron took two days. They are a much smaller company and took a couple of days before they got back to me. Because the main thing is really the type of support that I could get, JAMS won out over VisualCron, even though VisualCron ironically looks prettier. 

The JAMS client is ugly, but I got support. With VisualCron, which I think is based in Sweden, the time difference would have been difficult, whereas JAMS is somewhere within the U.S.A. In hindsight, it is probably a lot easier to use JAMS because we are the government, so it probably looked better than if I was dealing with someone from overseas. 

Before they were bought over by HelpSystems, they were just JAMS. I spent time on quite a few phone calls with their sales rep, who won me over with their level of support. 

Biggest lesson learnt: It is critical having a scheduling tool that will show you where all the jobs are and what their dependencies have been when you are doing batch jobs. In the past, SQL Server Agent jobs allowed you to do it, but you really needed the ability to look at interdependencies between jobs. That is what JAMS gives you.

The reason why I am giving it a seven is because of the UI. If they fix the UI, I would give a higher grade than seven.

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.