Stonebranch Reviews

The primary use case is that we are now at the point where we are creating workflows and it is allowing us to shorten the time it takes for tasks to go through multiple machines. We wanted something that would give us better visibility.

We have different systems that do different things very well, and we previously had time frames for when tasks would have to be done. It has allowed us to streamline the workflow so that the machines aren't sitting idle. The work gets done and the information is available through production at a much quicker rate.

It really cuts down the time that multiple machines take to touch a task. We may have our ERP system create a file and send it to our integration server where it will dice and mash up some inventory requirements. We will send an order by FTP to our vendor and, at the same time, we're seeing that we have sent it in and that it should be on a truck and coming in in a few days. We see the specific time and can alert the planning group that we've already done this. It used to be these tasks were done on separate machines and would take 30 or 45 minutes per machine. If everything was clean, it only took 10 minutes from start to finish, but there was a lot of dead time making sure that each machine had time to complete its task in a base scenario. So it has really helped our abilities in terms of where we're at as a manufacturing organization.

Stonebranch has also saved us money because it has kept us from having to over-provision Windows Servers. With this solution we can put stuff in a workflow and get it through as quickly as can be, instead of allocating time on other boxes to do things. I believe it has kept us from having to add Windows Servers and drive up our costs with Microsoft.

I like that the users can kick off the tasks that the administrators have allowed them to kick off so that they are more in control of the data that they need. They don't have to contact IT or other people to get the data they need. It makes the users very self-sufficient and they like it too. They don't have to wait on people. When they know they need it, they can just go start the job and whenever it's done they get the data.

We're using the Universal Controller and, while it took a little while to get everything we needed into it, once it was there it became a really nice tool. We can delegate tasks through it or we can delegate all tasks for certain machines through it. It's a really nice, central point to let us know which tasks have failed. I come from a programming background and, as a programmer, I would output a log file from our jobs. After a while, people forget to check log files. With Stonebranch, as long as the error code is there, it displays on the dashboard right away, so you don't have to remember to go check the log file. It gives us a lot better visibility, and a lot more quickly. The Universal Controller, and everything we do with Stonebranch, is on-premise.

The tasks are incredibly capable, and as long as you name them with a nice, uniform naming convention, they are very useful. You can create some interesting workflows through various machines, or you can just have it kick off single tasks. All in all, I really like the Universal Task. You can do some mutually exclusive stuff, such as an "A not B" kind of thing. It has a lot of capabilities behind the scenes. We don't use it to its full capabilities, but it is very strong and a very capable interface.

I really like the agents. We've had no trouble with them interfering with any of our other systems or vendors — and some of the machines they're running on are very flaky. But I've never been able to trace any problems back to Stonebranch. The problems we had after Stonebranch were the same problems we had before we put the Stonebranch agents on those machines. The interoperability is really nice. It has a minimal footprint, it doesn't consume much RAM, and there is very little network overhead unless the machine is actually doing something and sending data back. It's really nice to fire-and-forget. The syscontroller tells the task to start on the remote machine. The remote machine executes it and when it's done it sends back the package of data that the control holds and consumes. It's really a very well thought-out system.

There is room for improvement with its connectivity with the Microsoft SRS system. It is very weak. They keep telling us it works with it, and technically it does, but it does not provide a lot of visibility. We have lost a lot of visibility migrating to Stonebranch, compared with just running tasks on the SRS server. That's really about the only thing that is a sore point for us.

We don't really use the Stonebranch Marketplace. We looked at it earlier and management really wasn't impressed. So admin was told not to worry about it. It could be that if we were looking at it now, now that we're smarter, I think we would find things there. But we have gotten used to the way we're doing things now, so we don't want to rock the boat.

We started looking at Stonebranch in early 2017. We had everything on, all the machines were connected, by mid-2017, and we had moved all services and scheduled tasks and cron tasks to it by late 2017.

We had been using version 6.3 and we are in the process of upgrading to 6.8 now.

It's rock-solid.

The resiliency is very good. It is very solid. If the server shuts down, it will do its best to try and make up what it can, depending on how you have configured it. But it does a really good job of trying to recover gracefully. 

For example, a while back we had a Unix server go down and it was going down because of a bad connection with something that was hosted on another box. Stonebranch was aware of the problems that we were having even finishing. Once we got all the problems cleared, instead of it trying to continue running all 800 jobs that had been started but never finished, it only tried to rerun the last job, which I thought was a really nice solution. We didn't have 800 instances of the same job trying to be rerun.

Our production Stonebranch server is interacting with 27 different systems: Unix, AIX, Red Hat, and Windows systems. It's firing off about 1,000 jobs an hour and there's no problem. I don't see it taxing the CPU of the box we've got it running on it. It's incredibly scalable. I cannot imagine what it would take to start getting it overheated.

Technical support is very capable. The helpdesk is very responsive and knowledgeable and if they don't know, they will reach out to somebody on the engineering team. About 90 percent of the problems that I've had to talk to their helpdesk about have been through error on my part. Either I thought something was supposed to do something it obviously doesn't do, and I would have known if I had read the documentation better, or I had misconfigured something. They are very responsive and very knowledgeable.

We used cron and Task Scheduler from Microsoft and a gut-feel on how long systems should take to process something.

The initial setup was very straightforward. I've come from a programming background, so distributed systems like this are something I'm very familiar with. It seemed pretty straightforward. It was a simple cut-and-dry task. It seemed very basic to me.

It took us between eight months and a year to deploy it across our organization. The implementation strategy was to get it done and make it work as quickly as we could.

We had a consultant from Stonebranch come down for a week. I worked with him a little bit. He did some work and then I would do some work.

I've made a few calls to their helpdesk, but I have done 90 percent of it on my own, including the upgrades. It's a very simple system. It's not complex, but it does allow you to do complex things.

Go at this slowly and methodically. When they came in, they did a lot of things very quickly, and we didn't really understand the implication of the answers we were giving. We have gone back to re-do a lot of that work. Now that we're smarter, and much better at this, we have found that being slow and methodical pays off in the long-run.

The solution has enabled digital transformation at our company but it's been a very slow process, and that is because the people we have are very traditional, old-school people. This is a little outside of the norm for people who grew up using the Windows Task Scheduler. They are having a little trouble with this. The idea of correcting workflows is still new to some of these people. It is allowing us to have the digital transformation — we're able to move things through quicker — but I don't know that everybody is aware of this or is taking advantage of it. New systems are being bought and spec'd out, and we can get Stonebranch to work with them, but it's kind of as an afterthought. They aren't used to thinking of Stonebranch when they're looking at the new systems.

We've got a couple people in engineering that are using the solution but it's mostly IT people who are using it, programmers and their managers. Our ERP coordinator uses it a lot. In engineering we've got CAE administrators using it to shut down and restart processes for their systems. And we have a couple of other users using it, but their use is very limited. We give them the tasks but we don't give them a lot of tasks as they are a small cog in the wheel. You can't give them too much power or they'll be messing up somebody else's job. We're mostly giving knowledge workers the ability to handle their own tasks if they can do it in a vacuum. That amounts to a few people in finance, a few in production, a couple in engineering and most of the people in IT. I'm the only person who handles deployment and maintenance of the solution. But that is not my full-time job. Once tasks get set up, they go and they run and they just work.

Automate batch processing jobs that used to run on cron and had very ambiguous logging. It really helped us automated many manual jobs as well that were time-consuming and tedious.

UAC has improved our organization by exposing many dependencies between our batch jobs that would not be visible before. This helped us improve our job scheduling by managing dependencies and better scheduling of jobs.

Workflow editor and the ability to visually see how a particular job or set or jobs will run together, when and under what conditions. 

REST API can be improved by exposing more information about running instances. For example, the failed error message of a Stored procedure task cannot be seen through the API. Other features that would be helpful is to dynamically insert new tasks to be run at run time when certain conditions are met. Currently, that's possible with a web service task but only one task can be inserted at a time for one instance which is limiting possibilities.

No issues.

No issues.

We always get great service and support from all of the staff. Lisa has been one of the main contacts and helpful support representatives that has helped us through the years. Thank you Lisa!

No.

I was not part of the initial setup of the system so I'm unfamiliar.

I was not part of the decision process of picking a solution.

Keep up the great work and awesome support!

I am a consultant. Stonebranch was used for retail businesses.

I like the dashboard and the various workflows. 

It can't handle negative written codes. 

If a program was providing a negative value, it wouldn't be able to handle it well.

There some issues with the conversions initially and with the initial simulations. These are areas that could be improved.

I have been using the most recent version of Stonebranch Universal Automation Center for two years.

It's reasonably stable and there are no complaints.

It's a very scalable solution.

I haven't dealt with technical support directly, but I have worked with people in the company who have worked with Stonebranc technical support.

There are no complaints, but they have to work on some of the criteria they use. Some of the things suggested didn't work well and didn't get converted properly. I have had to redo it because of that.

The initial setup was handled by another department. We transitioned and built our virtuals after the environment was set up.

I am not aware of the cost.

The project using Stonebranch has finished. I don't have access to the Stonebranch environment now. We last used it six to twelve months ago.

It was not complex for me, but you have to follow the documentation. Spend some time to learn about it, then it's no big deal.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use it for enterprise scheduling and workload automation. For the most part, it runs our internal mainframe batch jobs and does file transfer processes in and outside the company.

Since we put in Stonebranch, compared to our older scheduler and systems, we've had better visibility, better alerting, better restart-ability, and better retry-ability. For instance, if a file transfer fails and it doesn't send, we can tell it to try 30 minutes later, and that reduces manual intervention for a once-and-done type of failure.

The Stonebranch Marketplace has been helpful. We've obtained a few items from there and have started to implement them.

In terms of our company's digital transformation, it's definitely become a central component of our processing and our workflows. It's allowed us to integrate disparate systems into this system, so we can monitor and schedule activities on those servers.

We have also saved on the licensing cost, although I don't know how much compared to our old product. The way it runs our workflows has saved people-time. If something fails and we don't necessarily have to intervene, we can take another pass at it within the scheduler and do automation in that situation. It takes away from manual intervention which would take time. There's a soft benefit there.

It has saved us about ten hours a week, depending upon who had to field the issue.

The ability to monitor tasks that are on the open-system side as well as our mainframe side gives us a one-window view of all our processes.

I love the Universal Controller. It's been great for us. We host it on-premise. It resides here on their own servers within our network, within the company. It's High Availability, meaning there's failover from one server to the other if one goes down.

The Stonebranch Universal Task is very flexible. There are many different tasks that are available for use.

Usually, when there's something that I need from them, I put in a request for an enhancement. It typically takes a few months, but they deliver.

For instance, I have a request regarding our agent on the mainframe. It may time out when communicating to the Universal Controller, when the mainframe is extremely busy. That can cause a task which is running at that time to not see the results of the job that ran on the mainframe. It happens sporadically during times of really busy CPU usage. We're expecting that enhancement from them in the fourth quarter.

The solution is very resilient. You have multiple agents and you have High Availability, so we're able to do maintenance to one server without affecting its availability.

It's been rock-solid for us.

It's very scalable. You can run as many agents as you need, depending upon how many servers you're monitoring or integrating into it. We're running about 10,000 tasks every day. I've heard of other companies doing hundreds of thousands. I'm not concerned about scalability.

Usage is increasing at a steady rate. It's heavily used. It's a very integral piece of our batch processing daily.

I typically communicate with them a couple of times a year if I have an issue. They have a good helpdesk process and ticketing process that work very well.

Tech support is excellent.

We used a product from ASG. It was their Beta 42 solution. It's something that they purchased and it was pretty old. It ran on the mainframe. It just didn't give us the flexibility we needed to do enterprise-wide and to be able to integrate server tasks or open-systems tasks with the mainframe.

Stonebranch replaced our old, mainframe scheduler, and we got much more flexibility in the new product, compared to the old product. Our file transfer processes are much more resilient. And one of the biggest benefits is that when a job fails it sends an email to us and alerts us about the failure. In addition, it sends it to our ticketing system and it opens up a problem ticket automatically.

Setup and installation are pretty easy. Converting from an old scheduler to a new one with all of the nuances of scheduling-criteria was a challenge. We used their Hired Services to help us do that.

In terms of the testing process, we were able to test during the next three months and we were able to run in parallel. By executing the Stonebranch version of the scheduler, we were pointing to dummy jobs but we were able to basically parallel our mainframe scheduler. That enabled us to make sure things were kicking off at the right times and in sync. That was something I did, not something that they did. That really helped us get a comfort level that everything was going to kick off properly, in the right order, and the right times. By doing that parallel running, we were able to resolve a lot of potential problems.

It was about a four- to five-month engagement for the conversion.

We used Stonebranch people to do it. It went very well. They were very helpful.

I don't have pricing information, but I do know it's cheaper than our old legacy system. Other than the standard licensing fees there are no additional costs.

We looked at a few automation schedulers. The long-term direction is that we're looking at a ten-to-15-year plan to migrate off the mainframe. It made sense to get an enterprise solution that was open-systems based. That's what Stonebranch brought to us.

Try it out, get to know the product and see how it works.

We have two system admins or schedulers, master schedulers, me and my co-worker. In our test and dev environment, we have four staff involved, counting me and my co-worker. Since everything was cut over to production and stabilized, we have had to spend about ten hours a week on it. We have operators monitoring it 24/7.

I would rate it at nine out of ten. I work with it every day and it does what I need it to do. I can't think of anything off the top of my head that I need as an enhancement at the moment.

I am a part of a production support team, and we automate most of our work using this. It reduces all the manual work.

Earlier, it used to take us a lot of time for file transfers and creating a backup, but after this automation, the pain and time have been reduced a lot.

It is very user-friendly, and it is quite easy to use. Moreover, you can integrate a lot of applications by using this simple tool, and it holds all the details in a very simplified manner.

More number of FAQs should be provided because I found it hard to configure when I started using this tool.

I see it as a stable tool so far.

Customer support is really helpful.

No, I did not.

It was a bit complex for me.

In-house.

Pricing is very comparable to other tools in the market.

No.

Scheduling Unix and Wintel batches. Full package - finance, backups, transfers. Three environments.  

Our organization could enter the cloud at full speed. 

Triggers separate from tasks contrary to the competitors.  

Lifecycle management.

More than five years.

solution in general stable however last OMS updates are blurring out this opinion.

scalability is good however it is lacking alternative to extend controller cluster's node numer.

reaction time is fair, however it happens that their will of help it not necessary handy, especially when you hardening the solution.

previous scheduler was TWS 8.5.  More expensive, less stable, less capable

a basic setup is straight forward however during setting some more advansed option it could be complex to achive

in-house

for sure unlimited license

control m

We are currently converting a segment of our distributed batch scheduling requirements from another vendor. The new model will give each application the ability to build, maintain and monitor their own batch flows.

This product will allow us a safer HA environment both in production as well as development /preproduction.

The bundling promotion feature will greatly save time and improve implementation by reducing the manual intervention required to move workflows from our test/staging environment.

• The API's need to fully meet the capabilities of the user interface.
• Better support of workload balancers (F5).

We had a number of schedulers over the years, leading the conversion discussion is usually surrounding vendor support as well as reliability issues.

We evaluated seven products and brought in three for proof of concept.

Originally purchased as a replacement for CA7/11, now used for full-blown enterprise automation. We utilize agents on Linux, Windows, iSeries, and zSeries machines.

Made the job of automating tasks easier, especially tasks that cross application boundaries.  Since we have applications that cross multiple platforms, this simplified where tasks get automated from several locations down to a single controller.

Workflows in general. It's great to automate across multiple servers through multiple applications. It is also useful to be able to use the universal templates to create our own automation types. We have found this useful for several different applications, as well as our own internal FTP task type.

The FTP tasks. Ever since UAC changed to using cURL for FTP, we have had a lot of issues.  90% or more of our FTP tasks have been moved away from the UAC task type to our own FTP task using WS-FTP pro (which has more flexibility, that UAC does not offer such as PGP encryption)

In some of the earlier releases (5 and prior). Nothing in newer releases.

No.

Customer support was superb! I can't say nearly enough great things about Lisa and the whole gang!

CA7/CA11 - switched due to cost.

I was not there for the initial set up of the single environment. That being said, I implemented a tiered environment and it was very easy to set up.

StoneBranch assisted setup.

Unknown to me.

The pricing of this product, compared to competitors is great. There is a general ease of set up for agents on all systems (except the mainframe which can be a little trickier).

I was not there at the time of the switch.

UAC is a wonderful product, and as an end user, I would fully suggest looking into this product.