Stonebranch Reviews

Scheduling Linux and Windows tasks from a 3rd party scheduler running on IBM z System. Integrating mainframe workload with distributed ones.

Provided us with a central overview of our Linux and Windows agents and the ability to monitor the exact software-versions of the installed agents.

Agent overview with clustering, monitoring and filtering the different operating systems and/or software versions.

Dealing with customer requirements and enhancements. The process now is a little bit non-transparent. 

The product is very stable. When problems occurred, they were due to the environment and not the product itself.

Can be scaled.

Customer service and technical support are very good and have quick reaction times. 

Initial setup is straightforward but finding the optimal settings is not always trivial.

IBM zCentric

Centralized scheduling and file transfers running on a couple of hundred agents (Windows/Unix/Linux).

• We migrated multiple scheduling applications to UAC for less costs and more efficient management.
• Scripting is also centralized in one library.
• UAC has a lot of scheduling options for various tasks.

• The possibility to connect multiple tasks in a workflow across domains and operating systems.
• Also the UDM file transfers and the possibilities which can be achieved with UDM scripting.
• The GUI is also easy to operate and does not need installation since it is web-based.

• Virtual resource priorities could be better.
• Maybe in the future, the use of queues.
• Promoting objects to multiple environments at once.

Stability of UAC is good. When problems do arise, they can be quickly solved most times, so downtime is minimal. We are running a high-availability environment.

Its processes are easily scalable.

Throughout the years we have been working with UAC, the experience we have had with support has been very good. Technical know-how is great and also second line support is very helpful.

We used: 

• IBM Tivoli Workload Scheduler
• Redwood CPS for scheduling SAP tasks
• Redwood Cronacle
• Opalis, also
• AT scheduling on Windows, and
• Crontab scheduling. 

We switched to UAC because we did not want all the other schedulers and corresponding teams. It is also more cost-efficient.

Since we do have many security rules in our company, we needed to use some external scripting for setting permissions, etc. Without these, installing is a breeze.

We hired an external business consultant who helped us with the installation. Also had a small vendor team (one person) to help us migrate one scheduling application to UAC.

No clue.

Choose an enterprise license to have unlimited agents, tasks, etc.

We did look at UC4 (Automic Software), but after evaluation, UAC had more to offer.

No additional comments.

We use UAC on a daily basis to serve our internal customers. My team uses UAC to create workflows based on business requirements, creating patching campaigns and provide support. 

It provides good automation capabilities, our company decided that UAC will be a group standard. It provides great value to our business. 

From a Product Owner perspective, I can say that for me, the most valuable features are: web interface, business services allowing to segregate users, reporting capabilities. 

In my opinion, training materials and FAQ/support should be improved. For people who start using UAC in a DevOps model, it's hard to understand configuration and how UAC works, how to create workflows, etc. More online classes or tutorials. 

Yes, it happens from time to time that UAC is not available, we work with the Stonebranch support team when it happens, it's not 100% bulletproof. 

Good, but response time should be improved. We had to chase the support team several times after P1 to get RCA.

No.

I wasn't part of the team when setup was done.

We are scheduling applications and tasks for our internal customers.

My peers are often contacting the Stonebranch Universal Automation Center to get some help and they often get necessary feedback.

Most valuable option is creating tasks and triggering them on scheduled time. It is so helpful that tasks can be added to Workflows and many dependencies can be created between those tasks. 

In my opinion, scheduler sometimes is getting turned off due to causes that Opswise was not predicted.

Sometimes it fails.

No, I did not use any other schedulers. 

• We are using Stonebranch to automate our MDM solution with all inbound and outbound systems. 
• We also use it for scheduling jobs or process to extract data from our business app to data warehouse solutions.
  

It really helped with the heavy lifting of the integration and scheduling gaps within our MDM solution and other systems. We have ETL solutions with native scheduling feature, but with Stonebranch we have improved our scheduling making it so autonomous and easy.

• Ready-to-use standard API or interfaces available, and flexible scheduling. 
• The beautiful part of scheduling is you can do weekdays or business days or custom business days. 
• The template format is very helpful when you have 100s of jobs to be scheduled every day.
• Email feature can be customized based on the variables and parameters.

For me, Stonebranch can do more than integration and scheduling, like real-time interfacing services and point-to-point to integration. With this, we don't want to invest money on multiple tools for different purposes.

We didn't have one enterprise scheduling to automation tool before Stonebranch. With Stonebranch, we are able to bring all enterprise automation to once place.

I'm very much pleased with the setup process or installation process, and licensing. 

We are a SAP shop, we have evaluated Redwood, WorkFusion, and Stonebranch.

No.

Using Universal Agent as a distributed agent (like extended agents), managed with IBM Workload Scheduler for z/OS.

It runs unbelievably good because when we installed it, it ran perfectly. It is really stable and just needs minimal maintenance.

• Runs without problems 
• The joblog (STDERR, STDOUT) is spooled online to z/OS, so it is easy for the z/OS user to manage a distributed job.

• Run in Unix and Windows environments
  

Additional features:

• Migration tool for encrypted username/password to use the new Keystore feature
• UDM third-party file transfer
• Enable proxy certificates for IBM System SSL.

We had no enterprise solution in place for our application. This was meant to support Linux and Windows.

The organization supports an application which impacts multiple platforms. This has helped a great deal with the initial setup and ongoing maintenance, in terms of being able to do so in one place.

• The layout of the UI is solid.  
• It has really helped scale automation efforts.
• I also like the existing templates.
  

• FTP tasks have been an issue. 
• It has also been challenging to support PGP encryption which is a fairly standard encryption method.
  

No issues with the stability of UAC, it has really never been a problem for us.

The tool is consistently executing large batch jobs. Issues that we attempt to correct are more often than not within the application itself and not UAC.

Not much interaction personally.

At other organizations, I have used CA Unicenter. It was OK, but on working with UAC, I prefer this tool.

There were some complexities, but that was our own doing in terms of our application and the platforms we support.

We used Stonebranch, they were solid.

We have far fewer folks running jobs manually from a command prompt. We have visibility into our job streams. ROI continues to grow.

Found it to be reasonable and worth the investment.

Yes, CA Unicenter was considered.

Universal Agent is used as a distributed scheduling agent with IBM Workload Scheduler for z/OS. It's used in different environments (development, production) for scheduling jobs on open systems.

Universal Agent and its infrastructure make it very easy to schedule jobs on every system using one scheduler.

• Universal Agent runs very stable and just needs very less maintenance. 
• The easy-to-use interface gives access to the shell environment of the target system.

• A migration tool for encrypted username/password to use the new keystore feature.
• Enabling proxy certificates for IBM's System SSL would be great.

It runs very stable.

It is easy to scale the environment by adding new clients to the server pool. However, you have to do some manual work.

In most cases, the customer service replies in less than one working day.

Setting it up for your environment and security concepts needs advanced knowledge about the basics.