Stonebranch Reviews

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. 

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!

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.

FileTransfers and batch automation in Java environments. Implement daily checks on database tables with SQL tasks.

UAC helped us to automate manual tasks and reduce the time for people to do manual tasks. 

Create Java between tasks and show this in a graphical overview. Integrate easily different application with UNIX tasks.

Have a better graphical workflow overview, more information on icons, the UI uses. We would like to have information in dependencies in virtual recourses.

Stable.

It's good.

Awesome and fast.

Our own implementation.

Easy, upgrade was a bit complex.

In-house.

Cheap and reliable.

No.