Tidal by Redwood Reviews

Tidal is used for workload automation, batch jobs. It lets us run financial jobs, warehouse replenishment jobs, and reporting jobs across multiple applications, such as SAP, warehouse management systems, as well as our auditing system. We run something like 11,000 jobs every day across our enterprise.

The types of application middleware that we use it to automate include Azure Data Factory, data warehouse jobs, Azure Analysis Services jobs, our PDM database system, as well as our warehouse system that handles product reordering, picking and packing, and e-com orders.

The biggest improvement, and the reason that it was brought into the organization, is the creation of a cohesive set of job streams across multiple applications. An example would be if you order a coat on our website. That order goes through our e-com system. Eventually, it gets picked up by Tidal, handed off to our SAP financial system and order fulfillment system, and is then sent over to the warehouse management environment. Those applications enable us to collect the money and to know what we need to replenish. We also use them to get the coat ordered and sent to the person who ordered it. All of that is handled by different applications across our enterprise and Tidal gives us the way to schedule those in a single job stream that can be managed with dependencies and tracked.

Tidal has helped increase capacity, in terms of the number of jobs, but a lot of that has followed the increase in virtual machine and database capacity. We've gone from about 2,000 jobs a day to around 11,000 jobs a day. Tidal has been easily able to keep up with that capacity.

It has the ability to not only schedule jobs, so they run within a certain calendar time, but we can also trigger jobs ad hoc, and we can do that via email and file triggers, and in a variety of other ways. That has allowed me to build out flexibility for different team members and different needs throughout the year, depending on our sales cycles and our retail cycles. It allows people to run a job without even having to open the system.

The Graphical Views feature is also very good for helping us to understand a job stream. It's great for providing a visual overview of the status of a workflow, especially the Critical Path view. That is one of our favorites.

I'm the administrator and I keep the system healthy, but I don't monitor specific jobs. We have different folks who do that and they find it really nice to click on a job that's at the end of a long job stream and get an idea of its health, using the Graphical Views. Not every team uses them, but the folks who do really like them.

Tidal integrates with and connects to different systems to run the different jobs and it does that very well. There are connections from Tidal to SAP ECC, the warehouse management systems, et cetera. Not only does it do a great job running the jobs, but we get very valuable information back into Tidal about the health of a job. Did it run well? If not, what happened? It becomes a nice single pane of glass to find out if things are working the way we want. 

We also integrate it with our ticketing service management system, which is Cherwell. That works very well too. If a job fails, we integrate with Cherwell to create an incident that is then acted on and that has been pretty smooth.

If you have familiarity with APIs, it's a matter of just looking over the documentation and understanding Tidal's way of using the API, and then you can build integration with PowerShell scripts. That's something we're doing with the Cherwell integration to bring data from Tidal into Cherwell.

The ease of drilling down into details using the Graphical Views is moderate because there is a little bit of a learning curve. It could be a little easier, but it's definitely not bad.

Similarly, the user interface is moderate. They've improved it but there is room for more improvement. I'm so used to it now that it's second nature, but I do handle the training for our new users and that gives me an idea that sometimes it's confusing as you start to get into it. The company is working to improve it, from what I understand.

I would also like to see more of a cloud/hybrid solution. I know they're working towards it, but I would like to see that sooner. Currently, it is on-prem and that's fine because most of the applications it supports are also on-prem, but there is potential for more applications to move to the cloud. It would be nice to have a hybrid solution.

Also, when we patch to the next version, there is often a little thing that breaks. It has rarely been a big deal, but I always seem to have to follow up on one tiny issue. It would help if they had some better QA testing of their patches. It could be I'm just too aggressive on patching, but at the same time, better testing would be good. Whenever I do open a ticket, they follow up on it quickly and I get great service, but I'd rather not open a ticket.

I have been using Tidal Automation for eight to nine years.

We have only ever had one system outage related to Tidal that was Tidal's fault. That's pretty amazing for a product that we use all the time.

We're a medium-sized company at 11,000 jobs and we're using just one instance for that. My understanding is that it can scale out to hundreds of thousands of jobs, depending on how you implement it. We're in a good space and we would be able to scale out if we needed to. I don't see us needing to, but my understanding is that there are companies that use it on a much larger scale.

Over the years, they have built out connections to different types of systems that they didn't originally support. Azure Data Factory is new in the last eight years, and that means that Tidal didn't always need a connection to that system. They build out those types of connections and they work to stay current and to work with the applications that are out there. I see them striving to stay relevant, in a good way.

Tidal does a nice job of continuing to educate its customers on their solutions and what they're modifying or doing to provide new features. They have quarterly webinars that are very informative. I also find that our customer service rep is very informative. If I have a need for a demo of something that is new, I can reach out, get it scheduled, and they'll do a demo for it.

We have the solution deployed in a single data center where we have our production environment. We also have it in separate QA and dev environments. We connect to about 18 applications across our enterprise. Our total number of users is about 150, but on a weekly basis there are 20 to 30 people who use it heavily, people who are always in the system doing things.

One of their strongest areas is their customer service. Many of the same folks have worked at Tidal over the years. I have gotten to know some of the technical support people and we've built up a relationship. I can ask them questions and get answers that I trust. We've had our customer service rep for years, so I see a lot of consistency with their staff and the knowledge they have. 

If you submit a question and they discover it's a bug, they're good about getting it into a hotfix quickly, depending on the urgency of it. I find them to be really responsive and I find them to be knowledgeable and friendly. On the "people side," there is definitely very strong customer service and support.

I rate their support a 10 out of 10, especially compared to other situations I've run into.

Positive

I wasn't around for building out the original jobs, but I've had to install it on different systems as we've migrated, and it's pretty easy to install when moving to a new system. You just pick up the database, bring it over, and do a little bit of configuration.

Once you get comfortable with the system, it's pretty easy. It's consistent. There's always a learning curve, but it's moderate. It's not hard but it's not easy because you do have to learn things.

The amount of maintenance is pretty low. We patch it about three times, although they have patches that come out quarterly. The patches do two things: they fix issues and introduce new features. I'm usually patching because I'm interested in the new features. We could patch less, but we do it that often as a company choice. But in terms of keeping it healthy, we haven't had a lot of big issues related to Tidal, which is very good. The level of maintenance involved is good. I handle it on my own. It's not a complicated system, from a maintenance and support standpoint. That makes it a lot easier to keep healthy.

We have absolutely seen ROI. It's not just that it's critical to our company, but I also feel that there is definitely return on investment because of the good support.

We are satisfied with the pricing of Tidal. It's in the moderate range and it feels very achievable for us.

The base product itself, Tidal Automation, is licensed by the connections that you have to other systems. We review those whenever licensing comes up. If you want to add something like Tidal Explorer, or other modules, there is an additional cost.

They have modified the licensing model a few times and there has been a bit of a learning curve, which is expected, but in general, it seems to be clear and transparent. And they're very willing to talk to you and answer questions if you have them.

A few years ago we looked at Stonebranch Universal Automation Center, and we've occasionally looked at Control-M, to see what else is out there. 

From a cost perspective, Tidal beats them both, and we've had such good support from Tidal that it makes it harder to think about leaving, especially since the product works very well. Right now, we're not looking at anything else, but I always keep my ear open because you never know.

Work with the folks who own the systems where the jobs will run, so that you understand what your needs are, and leverage Tidal's customer support to come out, give you demos, and to help you get started. Their documentation is actually pretty good, it has improved over the years, so if you want to read it you can, and it will be helpful.

As the only support person for Tidal in our company, I'm very motivated to stay on top of things. That means I do a lot of training to make sure that my users, the people who build out the schedules, are knowledgeable and understand how to respond to issues.

I have also set up a lot of alerts that give me an idea of things that might have issues. All of that is done using Tidal's tools, which is great, to keep me on top of things.

We use Tidal to run jobs across multiple application platforms, such as SAP, ECC, PDN, and Informatica, as well as jobs that run in Azure cloud. We also use it for several warehouse management jobs with OS/400 and AS/400 connectors. We have a lot of different types of connectors, then we are bringing all these jobs into Tidal so we can set up dependencies between jobs that run, e.g., an SAP job and a OS400 job may be dependent on each other in some way, allowing a cross-platform job flow.

We are currently on the most recent version.

We are using it for cross-platform workloads. That is probably the biggest reason that we are using it. The solution is generally good. Over the years, we have needed to do our own learning about how to manage it in terms of understanding dependencies and successors, then setting up times and so forth. However, this is the type of stuff you would have to learn with any scheduling app. We find it to be really useful. I'm hoping with the Explorer tool that they'll have better reporting so we can do some full cross-platform job stream reporting that they haven't really done much in the past. Therefore, we should be able to see some of that. In terms of managing it, I find it very useful other than the learning curve.

We use cross-platform management for so many things. We use it a lot for our warehouse management replenishment type things: to and from SAP. Once we implemented our job stream flow, things gets sorted out of house for delivery and can be update in SAP (and vice versa). Having the job stream has been helpful. Also, having it all automated makes a difference to replenishment. 

We use the ability to enable admins and users to see the information relevant to them specifically in our production environment. We can, but don't always, limit someone to only seeing data that they need to see. Then, they are not overwhelmed by other data. We do allow most of our users to see all the other data just for information and to understand the environment. However, you can begin to narrow in on what you need, if you're using policies and work groups correctly. Depending on how we use it, especially in production, it lets users only be able to do what they should be doing in production. They should only be managing their jobs, possibly see other jobs, and understand if there is a delay upstream which could be impacting them. They won't be able to manage those jobs. They need to contact the right people who understand those jobs to manage them. The solution lets them work within their lanes and do the work correctly without having a negative impact upstream, and hopefully, not downstream. 

There is an awareness that we are scheduling across the multiple applications and understanding that all applications don't live in their own silos. There is an impact across the organization. It gives us that holistic awareness, in general.

In the past couple of years, I have done education and we have leveraged creating alerts that go to the right people. It has allowed us to do that. Therefore, I don't get alerts for something that I shouldn't be dealing with. Now, people who own the jobs get the alerts and they can figure out if there is a problem with the application that they need to work with or if it is something with Tidal. Then, if necessary, they can elevate it up to me. Fortunately, that doesn't happen as much anymore, which makes me very happy. It gives us the alerts in time so we can handle things ideally before they become critical, and hopefully, we're doing our jobs so the right people are contacted.

I love the "where used by" feature where you can find out where a particular job action, job event, or even a connector is being used. That is really good. 

I've seen a lot of improvements in the logging. It has become more useful. 

I'm looking forward to working with Explorer and Repository. I haven't had time to implement those yet, but I'm pretty excited about both of those tools. 

We get a lot of use out of variables within Tidal to help schedule jobs, help track things, create alerting, etc. I find those variables have a lot of use.

The solution’s drill-down functionality, so admins can investigate data or processes, depends on what we are looking at. In some places, it is better than others and getting a lot better. In the five years that I've been supporting this solution, I've seen them get much better at allowing us to get more detailed information in the logs and job activity. 

I'm still hoping with Explorer to be able to see end-to-end job streams. That's not really something that's easy to see today in the web client. However, I haven't worked with Explorer yet. One of the things that we have found frustrating is not being able to see an end-to-end job stream across multiple applications within Tidal. We use jobs for that right now, but I have high hopes that we'll be able to see that in Explorer.

The reporting piece needs improvement. They are working to improve it but this is the piece that they can continue to work on. By reporting, I mean things like end-to-end job streams, historical reporting over the long-term, and forecasting. Those are some areas that I've expressed to them where they need to up their game.

We have the transport functionality where you move ops from one system to another. Right now, it's a manual process. I would love to be able to have more automated transports. Then, I'd love that to be able to tie this into our ITSM system so we can have change approvals, which are then approved, then transports automatically happen. 

It feels like forever. We have had it at Columbia Sportswear for seven years. I have been supporting it for five years.

The stability has gotten a lot better. Every time that they level a version up, there are a few months where it is a little rocky, especially because they are trying to make some real changes on the back-end. Sometimes, I'm guilty of being a bit too cutting edge with the patches that I put in place. I have learned to hold back a little and give it a couple of months. Usually by that time, they have worked out the bugs and things are pretty stable. I would say this about any system.

I'm the only one who supports Tidal, then I pull in a dev person. There is usually one person involved with setting up the VMs. However, they have that automated so it is just a request for a standard set of servers. They just push a button and the servers are built. When we get to where there is QA testing, we're usually trying to align that with a lot of other QA testing. Therefore, people are naturally testing the system as they would with any other work that they are doing. Essentially, this is all of our schedulers, which are 15 to 20 consistently. I'm not asking them to do anything that they are not already doing, except tell me if there are problems.

I have a very loose backup person but I'm very motivated not to get calls on the weekends or vacation, which is why we built in our alerting systems. We try to keep them strong, so before anything gets to me, it's been vetted by the people who can solve the problem if it is job-specific. If Tidal itself goes down though, I'm the one who gets called because I'm the one who can fix it.

Tidal does a good job. We periodically have them do a performance review every six to nine months by sending them our logs. I open a ticket, then send them a bunch of logs. They take a look at them and we do any necessary tuning. We have discovered over the years, going from a small to medium to high-medium organization, that Tidal is very responsive in terms of helping us figure out how to tune systems so we have the best performance. It can handle very large scale organizations job-wise. It is just how you tune your servers, and they're very willing to help with that. The best thing that a person can do is work with Tidal support to find out exactly what is necessary on the back-end to have their system scaled out correctly. It can be done. We run about 8,000 jobs in production, but I know there are some systems which run tens of thousands of jobs of production. We haven't hit a scalability issue at all.

Regularly, 20 to 30 people use it in our organization on a week by week basis. We have about 100 users in the system. Their roles are developing, creating jobs, QA, testing job scenarios, events, and actions; everything around developing a job or job stream. Then, we have our service desk people who do the transports from QA into production. There are about four people who do this.

In production, people from each scheduling team are responsible for the health of their jobs, which can include if there are issues with the jobs running, maintenance that they have planned, setting those jobs on hold, asking me to put an outage on an adapter, rerunning jobs, or disabling/enabling jobs. It is general job development and job management.

The standard tech support at Tidal is very good. You can call or open a ticket, if you get stuck on something. They are usually quick with answer or at least quick to respond to you with more information. When I have gotten stuck, I have always been able to get help and get out of it. I once spent eight hours on a weekend call with one poor guy. 

The reality is you will always have issues that you have to escalate. That is just the world that we live in. 90 percent of the time, I have had a very good experience and gotten what I needed. I have been able to get support people on the phone. If we find something, and they haven't seen it, they are good at pulling in development. They are good at saying, "Okay, this is new. We will put it in a development." Now, with their new website where you can see your tickets and track things, they make it a lot easier. If you have a bug that is in development, you can track where it is and when it will probably be released. Now, there's a lot of transparency that makes it comforting to know your stuff is being worked on. These are improvements that they made as they moved away from Cisco. 

When it was supported by Cisco, it was okay but it wasn't as good. Since Tidal broke away from Cisco two years ago, that was when we saw the most improvements in terms of things that we had been asking for and the delivery on them. 

I think we had a variety of solutions that were sort of stitched together.

Its setup is around mid-level complexity. You need to do a little reading to understand how Tidal works. You need to understand things like connectors and the whole fault tolerant environment, but the data is all there to get to.

Whenever we are moving to a new operating system, I work with my infrastructure team to get new VMs built up in the right OS. I start to set them up with all the things that I need in order to build Tidal. At this point, I usually get a demo license from Tidal as I'm doing the build. This way, I can build and test but not take up a license. Then, when I'm ready to go live, I always go live in development first to QA, then production. So, I have a cut-over from the old system to the new system, then we migrate our database over. I work with my DBAs to do that. Then, I do testing in development to make sure everything is right, doing the same thing in QA. I also do more rigorous testing with the schedulers, then eventually it goes into production. It is about six weeks from development to production.

The migration to the cloud has been an extensive project. It is going generally well. A lot of what was running in the Informatica environment has now been shifted over into the Azure environment over the last couple of years. That is where some of the migration has been occurring.

The initial setup was done by somebody else who no longer works with the company. Since then, we have moved to new operating systems over the years. These are always new systems that we build up, then migrate from the old system to the new system. I've set this up several times, so systems that we are currently running are the ones that I've set up.

Thinking of all the people involved in checking jobs on a daily basis, manually running jobs or auditing them through standalone tools, and trying to connect them. We have saved hundreds of hours weekly, which is substantial.

I am able to create something predictable and manageable in such a way that we know that we will get alerted if there's a problem and know how jobs are going to run. People can see and manage their jobs on a daily basis without having to talk to me about them. The return on investment is scope of jobs, making it so the management of jobs is not something that is handled by one team. It can be parsed out to the schedulers who know and understand those jobs so they can have some control over them, then I don't have to worry about all the different jobs streams. I just have to look from above and be able to help make sure that the system itself works. 

Our yearly licensing costs are between $10,000 to $20,000. They have always been reasonable with us. I like that non-production licensing is about half the cost of production licensing. Licensing is by adapter typically. We have had scenarios where we have had to take an adapter from one environment to another, and they've allowed us to do that. They have made it a very reasonable process. There's definitely a feeling that they will work with you.

Budgeting is pretty predictable. They changed their model last time, which is why I'm not sure exactly how much it ended up costing. I know that our licensing guy did make a decision to license us in such a way that now we have a lot more flexibility based on adding VMs that can connect to Tidal and run jobs. So, it's not a problem to budget for it. 

We have on occasion looked at other options simply just to be aware of what is out there. We don't plan to change anything right now that I'm aware of simply because we don't have the time or budget. I'm not even sure we have the need. Every once in a while, we do look around because it's useful to go out, compare, and ensure that it's still something that fits our needs.

Depending on how you will roll it out, engage people who will be managing the jobs earlier in process so they are aware and can help plan how Tidal is used across the environment. That is something that I wish the people who had rolled it out had done. I don't know if that was even a consideration back then. There were definitely things that I would love to change about how we do our scheduling which are just so baked in at this point that it would be such a large change. Also, make sure that you engage and use Tidal's resources. They have some great resources and know what they are doing. Work with them, as they can help you figure out how to use this tool.

There are ways that it makes life more convenient in terms of ensuring the right people get alerted for issues. We are able to see job health, jobs over a couple of days, and have some predictability, but not as much as I would like to see in terms of forecasting. If we were to stop using it, we would go to something similar simply because it's so useful to have an overall scheduling application.

I have developed some training specifically for the learning curve. The basic job stuff is pretty quick, especially because we have a lot of people who can be leaned on. When you start drilling down into things like using variables or more ad hoc type settings, the learning curve is a little higher. However, we have a lot of people using those features or settings who help each other with learning them. While it's not incredibly steep, there is a learning curve. I do an hour to two hour sessions, which are either classroom led or recorded. That is usually enough for most people to get started. Sometimes, people will come back with more questions, which I totally encourage. Then, if they start to get into some of the deeper things, like ad hoc variables, I have additional sessions that they can attend. These are usually about an hour long and get them going down the right path. I know that Tidal has developed some training, but I had put some stuff in place before they did, as I wanted to train everybody so they could do their job and not have to talk to me.

The biggest lesson that I have learnt from using Tidal is train people. Make sure that the people who manage jobs understand what they are doing and educated to the best of your ability. That has been one of my key takeaways from this. Also, don't go to the latest patch when it first comes out. 

There is a lot of power within Tidal, probably a lot that we're not even using today in terms of managing jobs as well as how we can set up alerting. Also, they have great support, so I can usually get what I need.

It's pretty extensively used right now. We might shift some of our job scheduling to more on demand, then still leverage Tidal for more of the batch scheduling. At least for now, we will be using it as we are continuing to have systems added in. I even have a ticket open because we have an adapter that we just added in that is not quite working right, potentially due to me not understanding the adapter. Therefore, we're continuing to add job streams, but it will always be dependent on what applications we are adding.

Two years ago, I would have given it a six (out of 10). Today, I will give it a nine (out of 10).

Tidal has a great Interface that is user-friendly and easy to use.

It automates loads of tasks and complex workflows. 

The solution has increased efficiency and decreased manual interventions, which results in accuracy and productivity. 

One of the outstanding features is its flexibility; we can automate tasks of all sizes and complexity. 

Tidal integrates with other third-party systems, which makes it easy to connect and exchange data. 

Alert and notification features enable the user to know the status of the task.

It has simplified the complex workload by automating a huge number of tasks. We can configure and design even without coding knowledge. 

Tidal is a platform-independent software, which can be accessed in any browser. 

Error handling feature is amazing in Tidal, this improves business efficiency. A user-friendly interface makes users learn and navigate different modules quickly and effortlessly. 

Tidal is a valuable asset to our organization and will highly recommend it for implementation in businesses.

Tidal is versatile and a powerful automation tool. It has helped to streamline our business and improve the efficiency. It has reduced resource utilization and helps to automate tasks without any manual effort. 

It has great monitoring and managing features that track and respond to dependencies. Errors are identified and notified by the error handling functionality. It fixes the issues automatically, and error downtime is reduced - minimizing the failures.

Initially, it is complicated to understand the functionalities as there is limited product documentation. The setup and configuration of the software is a bit complicated. Providing the training videos for all the modules would be appreciated and It helps to gain more knowledge and understanding of the product. 

Support and assistance of the software should actively provide more service to end users. 

While performing the integration with other third-party systems, we experienced a lag and found it to be slow in performance

Tidal Workload Automation Software is primarily used for scheduling, monitoring, and managing critical business and IT workflows across an organization's IT infrastructure. 

This software automates the execution of various workflows, including batch jobs, data transfers, file processing, and application integration, among others. 

The software provides a centralized platform for managing and automating crucial business processes such as report generation and customer service operations. The software can be used in a variety of industries, including finance, health care, manufacturing, etc.

Tidal Workload Automation Software helped my organization to reduce operational costs by streamlining processes, eliminating errors, and minimizing the need for manual intervention. Additionally, automating tasks reduces the need for hiring additional personnel, which can result in significant cost savings.

Tidal Workload Automation Software provides the ability to quickly adapt to changing business requirements.

The software helps organizations to easily modify workflows to accommodate changes in business processes, and it can dynamically allocate resources based on changing workloads.

Tidal Workload Automation Software provides Role-based access control, ensuring that only authorized personnel can access sensitive data and workflows. This feature is essential because it helps organizations maintain security and compliance with industry-specific regulations.

Tidal Workload Automation Software offers dynamic job scheduling, allowing organizations to locate resources based on workload demands. This feature ensures the resources are efficiently utilized, which helps in improving the organization's productivity.

Tidal Software interface could be more intuitive and user-friendly. I felt a little difficult to find the features I need. A more streamlined interface could help improve usability.

With cyber threats increasing rapidly, Tidal could benefit more by improving the security features such as encryption and access controls.

Tidal software could be of more advantage if it gets integrated with popular DevOps tools such as GIT, Jenkins, and Docker could help to streamline workload automation and accelerate application development and deployment.

I have been using the Tidal Workload Automation Software for the past 1.1 years.

The primary use case of Tidal Automation solutions is to automate and manage complex and time-consuming tasks associated with scheduling and reducing manual efforts.

Tidal Automation solutions can streamline these tasks by automating data collection and analysis, scheduling maintenance tasks, and monitoring the performance of environments and the associated system. By automating repetitive and time-consuming tasks, Tidal Automation has helped us save time and resources, reduce errors, and improve operational efficiency.

It was deployed on-premise as a SaaS application.

The solution has improved our organization with:

1. Increased productivity. By automating tasks, we were able to focus on more valuable work, leading to increased productivity and efficiency.
2. Improved accuracy. Automating tasks has reduced the risk of human error, leading to more accurate results.
3. Enhanced compliance. Tidal Automation has helped us maintain compliance with regulations and standards by automating tasks such as audit trails and security checks.
4. Greater visibility. Tidal Automation provided a central dashboard for monitoring and managing tasks, providing greater visibility into an organization's operations.
5. Scalability. As our organization started growing, Tidal Automation was scaled to meet the increased workload and complexity of tasks.

The most valuable aspects of the solution include:

1. Workflow automation. Tidal Automation allows organizations to automate complex workflows and processes, reducing the need for manual intervention and improving operational efficiency.
2. Job scheduling. Tidal Automation provides a centralized scheduling system for jobs and tasks, allowing organizations to manage their workload and resources more effectively.
3. Error handling. Tidal Automation includes features for error handling and recovery, reducing the risk of job failures and minimizing downtime.
4. Monitoring and reporting. Tidal Automation provides real-time monitoring and reporting capabilities, allowing organizations to track job progress and performance and identify potential issues.
5. Integration with other systems. Tidal Automation can integrate with other systems and applications, allowing organizations to automate workflows across multiple platforms and environments.

The solution need to improve its offering via:

1. Artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities to enable predictive analytics and proactive issue resolution.
2. More advanced reporting and data visualization capabilities to enable deeper analysis of job performance and trends.
3. Enhanced integration capabilities with other systems and applications to provide a more comprehensive automation solution.
4. Advanced job dependency management and scheduling capabilities to ensure that jobs are executed in the correct order and on time.
5. Integration with cloud platforms to enable greater scalability and flexibility.

I've been using the solution for 1.2 years.

Our use of Tidal is mostly file-event driven. We use it to manage our ingestion, processing, and loading of data. Tidal has a hook and it runs ETL for us. It runs jobs and SQL and some of our database appliances like IIAS, the new version of Netezza Teradata.

We have a file gateway that receives a file and drops it in a location. That file event picks it up and drops it over to the ETL tool. The ETL tool will run and aggregate a number of source files and turn it into a properly formatted input file. That file then goes through data hygiene and data analysis. Then it goes through a matching process. It is then put back out and runs an ETL process to stick it into a SQL database. And then there are a number of jobs that are run in the SQL database to manipulate that file.

We don't have a lot of calendared events or scheduled windows.

We have a central location for Tidal in our data center, and then we have client-hosted solutions where we run smaller instances of Tidal, and those are in the cloud. We use AWS, Azure, and GCP.

It reduces our administrative costs. As much as people are in a DevOps model, we can create dashboards for tier-one people to monitor multiple jobs and then alert or call when things fail. It helps us with reliability and managing SLAs.

It has also helped to reduce weekend and overtime hours due to the fact that you can have a single person manage multiple jobs. If we didn't have the single pane of glass and that visibility, people would have to manually look at logs to determine the progress of a job. So it reduces headcount. But when you run 24 by seven and 365 you still have people working weekends.

We run 70,000 Tidal jobs a day. it would take a mountain of people months to run that many jobs manually.

What we find most useful from the operations side is that it provides a single pane of glass for managing that workstream. It also alerts us on failed jobs, so it's our monitoring and management tool for those workstreams. 

Tidal helps administrators and users to see the information that is relevant to them in that single pane of glass. They can see jobs running, they can see job history, and they can see job progression. If you look at alternatives like Airflow and clouds, you'd have to design your own UI to monitor the progress of the different jobs that you've created in Airflow. So Tidal is huge for us.

Most of our stuff is private clouds. We haven't had an issue with its support for private cloud or its migration to the cloud. In our scenarios, we run the masters here and we reach out to agents that are running in the cloud. We also use it to kick off command-line utilities for loading data into BLOB storage and S3 buckets. We use the SFTP utility to move files around.

One area for improvement is the command-line interface and the API to bulk-load jobs. It's a little bit kludgy, but we still manage without it. They're working on it and it's getting better all the time. In addition, the documentation for their API for creating jobs needs to be updated. It has a bit of a learning curve.

We also wish there was a search functionality for assigning actions to events, and users to workgroups. 

Finally, the S3 data mover jobs are still a little buggy.

I've been using Tidal Workload Automation for about 14 to 15 years.

After the 6.2 release, the stability became awesome. With 6.6.1 it was a little bit difficult, but everything after that has been solid.

Scaling is easy. You could run these in VMS. We happen to have physical boxes. 

We haven't scaled it out, such as creating a remote master. In instances where we thought we may have to kick off jobs from our Maryland data center or jobs in our Denver data center, over MPLS, we thought we would have issues but we didn't have any issues. We were fine. We've been able to run things centrally.

The databases scale the way SQL scales, either by giving it more memory or more CPU.

As we have brought on clients we've grown over the years. We have a tendency to overbuy for the Client Managers. Our Client Managers are coming up on four years now. In 2021 we'll likely do a tech refresh. We'll stand it up with another version of Tidal and we'll do the migration onto the new platform. At that time we'll look at scaling up the boxes a little bit. You can put a lot more workload, a lot more Tidal jobs, on these without having to increase CPU or memory.

Their tech support is awesome. We've had Tidal for a long time. We had Tidal when it was Tidal, and then when it was purchased by Cisco. During the time that it was purchased by Cisco, support was lacking. But now that it's part of the STA, it's back to being awesome.

We were using a home-grown solution. It was a cron job manager. It didn't do file events very well; it had monitor CIS logs. It was tough to schedule tasks. It was purpose-built so it didn't have a SQL adapter. It didn't have the ability to run on Netezza and things like that.

We switched because to programmatically create the enhancements for the things that came out-of-the-box with Tidal was just too costly. It would have taken too much time.

We've retooled our environment three times since we first installed it. Our last one was easy, a piece of cake. The ones prior to that were not so good. 

When Tidal sold it to Cisco, and they had introduced the concept of a Client Manager, a type of web interface, there was a time when going from one version to another version was not good. Now that Tidal is back to the STA Group, our upgrades are much easier.

With our last upgrade, we stood up a whole other set of servers — our servers were old — as well as a database. From the time we got the servers installed, loaded Tidal, and did our initial database export, so we could do testing, it took two to three weeks. It was a piece of cake. And then we did extensive testing.

In terms of the solution's learning curve, from an operations standpoint, teaching people how to search and manage jobs, and start and stop them, put jobs on hold and kill them, we can get someone up to speed in less than a week. For developers, it's a little bit more lengthy. There have been several instances where we have a Tidal developer, a subject matter expert — we've only had one or two of them — who has been able to train multiple people and make them serviceable. We've been doing it for 14 years, so we don't use Tidal training. We've created our own training documentation to get them up to speed for how we use Tidal. We can get them up to speed very quickly. I know people who have joined the company and who are writing and creating Tidal jobs two weeks or three weeks later.

For ROI we'd have to figure out how many man-hours am we're saving with Tidal versus not having it or having one of the other automation tools. We've grown up with it. I can't imagine being without it. Back in 2016, when we looked at possibly switching over to another solution, it wasn't a clear path to migrate to any of the other tools. We literally run our whole enterprise on this, so if Tidal goes down, the world stops.

We feel we're getting a pretty good deal with Tidal. It's supporting $600 to $700 million in revenue.

The licensing model's flexibility is awesome. The way it's licensed for us is per master and then per agent. We have an enterprise agreement, so we have unlimited agents, and we have it on 500 devices.

I don't know how it could be easier to budget for Tidal, given that there are no costs for upgrades and other enhancements. There are increases over time, but unless you add functionality, such as buying other adapters, it's very easy to manage costs for maintenance and the like.

In terms of the hardware that we purchased — VMs and storage and networking, and the VMs' SQL licensing — it was a little bit below $200,000. That doesn't include licensing.

The hardware list is includes

• a SQL cluster
• a utility server that we use to migrate jobs from dev to prod
• two masters in dev
• a fault manager in both dev and prod
• three Client Managers in dev and two Client Managers in prod
• for each of those Client Managers we have a database
• 11 VMs
• 12 physical boxes.

So we've got a pretty big environment.

There have been a couple of times that we have looked at competitors, especially when we saw that Cisco wasn't really investing time or money into it. It wasn't clear to us if Cisco was going to continue to invest in Tidal. So we went out and looked at the market and did evaluations. 

We looked at Automic or UC4. We looked at BMC Control-M. Stonebranch was actually interesting, back in 2016.

What it came down to was that Automic was tough because it was changing hands on a regular basis. Stonebranch was more in our price range, but Tidal's price for the way that we use it was cheaper. When we started looking at what it would take to migrate from one to the other, there was no ROI.

The way we evaluated things was we looked at our use cases and ranked them from one to ten, and then costs. All of Automic, Stonebranch, and BMC would do what we wanted them to do. I'm sure, if we had dug a little dig deeper, we'd have found the little idiosyncrasies between them. But the cost for those and the cost of migration was just too much.

We started seeing how Cisco was propping it up a little bit more, right before they sold it to STA. And when STA bought it, they assured us that they would start making improvements. We stopped our analysis of other solutions there.

Tidal's drill-down functionality is one of those things where you get out of it what you put into it. If you program it to fire-and-forget then it doesn't have a lot of drill-down mode to it. If you put in result codes and things like that, instead of using the agent to kick off the SSRS package in SQL, or if you use the adapter, then you can drill down.

We have about 100 users using Tidal in our organization. They are anywhere from developers to operations people to administrators. There are only a couple of administrators. There's a bunch of operators because we use this to run 24/7, 365 for 20 or 30 customers. For each of them there may be a couple of operations people and a couple of developers. As for maintenance, we patch our boxes, our masters, our Client Managers, and our databases every month, and it takes one person.

Our business frequently handles large volumes of financial transactions that must be handled accurately and quickly. Automating financial procedures like billing, invoicing, and payment processing with Tidal Automation can help cut down on errors and enhance productivity.

Additionally, Tidal Automation aids us in automating IT operations chores like software updates, server upkeep, and security patching. This can decrease downtime, boost system dependability, and enhance IT efficiency as a whole.

By automating tasks and facilitating the quick implementation of new processes, Tidal Automation is assisting our organization in adapting to changing market conditions, customer requirements, and other factors.

By lowering the possibility of errors and the costs that go along with them, this product can produce outcomes that are more accurate and consistent.

It enables us to concentrate on tasks that are more valuable, like procedure improvements, innovation, and customer service. As a result, workers may be more productive because they can accomplish greater tasks in quicker amounts of time.

Tidal Automation has personalized showcases that provide real-time insights into job execution, resource utilization, and other metrics. This feature can help users monitor and optimize their operations more effectively.

Additionally, it provides compliance and audibility features that let us keep track of and manage all actions done, as well as monitor and restrict access to private data. This might improve data protection and ensure that all legal criteria are met.

The best feature is that it allows task scheduling based on particular occurrences, like the receipt of files, database updates, or system notifications. This can ensure tasks are finished as required and in reaction to particular circumstances.

To better fit their unique needs, the solution should give more customization options. More options for personalization could make it simpler for users to modify the service to fit their particular processes and increase overall efficacy.

It should be capable of handling even more work and more difficult processes, which is beneficial in big organizations.

Overall, Tidal Automation is a strong tool for automating processes. However, there are ways to make the service better in areas like the ones on the list above.

I've been using the Tidal Automation tool for five months now, and it's been a fantastic tool for automating our work tasks and allowing us to complete more tasks in less time. It increases productivity and reduces the need for manual intervention.

We use Tidal to automate all the jobs within our IT applications, especially for our ERP, which is JD Edwards, as well as Oracle, and Microsoft. Currently, we execute 12,000 jobs per day through the platform.

It helps us make efficient and maximal use of our servers, from four in the morning until eight in the evening, with the maximum number of jobs executed automatically. We produce lenses for glasses in our factory and it's a 24/7 operation. The automation enables that, according to our requirements. Otherwise, we would need people to take action due to various dependencies, and it helps us avoid errors. 

We have to run about 12,000 jobs every day and the majority of them need to be launched from our ERP, JD Edwards. The native compatibility of the Tidal platform with JD Edwards dovetails with our greatest need. It's directly connected to the heart of our IT system. We couldn't work without it.

Nowadays, the UI is easy to use. Over time, with different versions, it has become better and better and now it's easy. It's very different than it was some years ago. It has improved.

We have never needed to use the REST API. The plugins provided by Tidal meet our integration needs completely. It integrates perfectly with our ecosystem, whether it's SQL Server, Windows, or our ERP.

One thing I would like to see improved is that, currently, when an action is executed and finishes in Tidal, it's marked as either "success" or "failure." I would like more options that would flag a job according to multiple options, rather than just "good" or "bad." We would like to be able to define five different types of results and proceed differently according to each one.

Tidal has told us that it's possible to do so through the product or with a workaround.

I have been using Tidal Automation for about 12 years.

It is very stable, fortunately. 

The scalability is fine for us.

We have not used their support very much over the last eight years. During that time, we may have submitted two tickets, because we are using the product in a very standard way. Generally, when we do need help, we call our partner.

Positive

We had a different scheduler before we started using Tidal but that was 12 years ago. We are very happy with the results of our switch. The product we used previously was Open Scheduler and we switched for two reasons. One was the cost of ownership of that product and the other was the set of requirements around our JD Edwards ERP solution.

The deployment was very simple. It involved the installation of an agent on a server. Nothing could have been simpler to install and use. We do have another data center coupled with our primary data center for high availability, so physically, there are two locations, but logically, they are one.

We currently have two people who work in Tidal, throughout the day, Monday to Friday. At other times, such as overnight and on weekends, we use managed services to work in Tidal.

In terms of major updates, there is only one every two years. There is very little maintenance needed.

We use a certified Tidal partner to help with upgrades and to be sure that everything is okay. It's so important that everything work perfectly that we prefer to use a consultant, even though we could do it ourselves. Our scheduler is in use 24/7. It never stops. It is the central piece of our IT operations. If it does not run properly, everything stops including production in our factory.

We have had a very good experience with our partner. We have been working with the same partner for 12 years and everything is working perfectly with them. We will be using their services again soon. They also help us with level-one requests.

The ROI is okay and that is why we continue to work with Tidal. Overall, the price is fair for the service we receive and the way it meets our automation requirements.

The most important measure, and our basis for comparison, is to look at the number of people who would be required to do the same thing.

There have been pricing increases, but with the reduction that our company obtained from Tidal this year, the pricing has become very acceptable for this type of product. It is fair, today, for what we use it for. If the price is increased, we may have to review things. 

We looked at other solutions but there weren't a lot of choices at that time because only two, Open Scheduler and Tidal, worked natively with JD Edwards. We went with Tidal mainly because of the way it works, with plugins, with JD Edwards.

Because my team has been using it for 12 years, they are used to it and have no difficulty using it. But in general, there is no problem using it daily.

For us, using the Graphical Views feature is the exception. It's not the easiest feature to use. We use it to present job flows, and the way they are organized and their dependencies, to our new people, because it makes things clear for them. But in general, we avoid using it and use the main screen. We know our applications well, so the tabular view is sufficient for us. It's more complicated to use the Graphical Views feature, for us, but that's based on what we have become used to using, day to day.