We performed a comparison between ActiveBatch Workload Automation and Rocket Zena based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Features: ActiveBatch Workload Automation is highly regarded for its flexibility and wide range of capabilities, including prebuilt tasks, live monitoring, and automatic scheduling. Rocket Zena is commended for its user-friendly design, intuitive interface, diagram functionality, and the ability to schedule jobs across multiple platforms.
ActiveBatch Workload Automation could benefit from enhancements in managed file transfer, transition to a subscription model, cloud aspect, user interface, reliability of triggers, monitoring dashboard, price, documentation, and integration with cloud platforms and DevOps tools. Rocket Zena could improve visibility into connections between applications, monitoring of agents, process limitations, UI loading time, intuitiveness of UI, installation process, task stacking, documentation, distributed platform availability, server communication, and notification feature.
Service and Support: ActiveBatch Workload Automation has been praised for its customer service, as it offers helpful and reliable technical support. However, some customers have expressed concerns regarding the escalation process. Rocket Zena is also known for its positive customer service, with support staff who are knowledgeable and responsive. However, obtaining higher-level support may require more time.
Ease of Deployment: The setup process for ActiveBatch Workload Automation was straightforward and uncomplicated, with no significant challenges encountered. However, there was a minor need for additional documentation during the file import process. Setting up Rocket Zena was more varied for users, with some finding it intricate and necessitating comprehension of various components. The integration with SAP posed a particular difficulty.
Pricing: ActiveBatch Workload Automation has a straightforward and quick setup process, with users finding the pricing to be fair and competitive. Rocket Zena is seen as a cost-effective and affordable choice, particularly suitable for smaller businesses.
ROI: ActiveBatch Workload Automation has proven to be highly effective in enhancing net revenue, resulting in noteworthy growth. Rocket Zena offers time-saving benefits and enhances accuracy in job scheduling, thereby reducing stress for engineers and administrators.
Comparison Results: ActiveBatch Workload Automation is highly preferred over Rocket Zena. Users appreciate ActiveBatch's simplicity, versatile features, scalability, and extensive automation capabilities. They find value in the prebuilt jobs, real-time monitoring, and automatic scheduling. ActiveBatch's extensive features and overall ease of use are highly valued.
"There are hundreds of pre-built steps."
"By implementing a sophisticated scheduling mechanism, the system allows for the precise triggering of jobs at user-selected frequencies, enabling a seamless and automated execution of tasks according to specified time intervals."
"The nice thing about ActiveBatch is once we have created a specific job that can be easily be replicated to another job, then minimal changes will have to be made. This makes things nice. Reduction of coding is substantial in a lot of cases. The replication of one job to another is just doing a few minor tweaks and rolling it into production. This decreases our development costs substantially."
"Since we are no longer waiting for an operator to see that a job is finished, we have changed our daily cycle from running in eight hours down to about five. We had a third shift-operator retire and that position was never refilled."
"One of the most valuable features of this solution is the versatility of the prebuilt jobs."
"It has helped with scheduling complex jobs with simple scripts."
"I found ActiveBatch Workload Automation to be a very good scheduling tool. What I like best about it is that it has very less downtime when managing many complex scheduling workflows, so I'm very impressed with ActiveBatch Workload Automation."
"We use the main job-scheduling feature. It's the only thing we use in the tool. That's the reason we are using the tool: to reduce costs by replacing manual tasks with automated tasks and to perform regular, repetitive tasks in a more reliable way."
"From a Linux configuration point of view, Rocket Zena is straightforward. It's fairly easy to set up the server and agents once you know how to do it."
"The most valuable feature is the FTP file transfer."
"I have used other tools with similar capabilities; it's the ease of use."
"Its FTP feature is very good, as is scheduling any process or task with the Zena client. I have found it to be very helpful. If a task fails, it gives you a prompt."
"I have found the scheduling feature the most valuable. I can map dependencies by using ASG-Zena. It gives a nice, quick visualization as to where things are."
"We haven't had any problems since we installed it. It runs as expected, we haven't had any critical problems. It helps keeps the business running 24/7."
"You can click Ctrl-G and bring a diagram view. You're able to view in a diagram format. The view that it provides is easy, and you can move to the left, up, or down. You can double-click on a certain process. It'll drill into that process and all of its underlying components. You can double-click on an arrow or a component, and it'll bring up a screen that'll have all the variables that are assigned to that particular piece, as well as the values at run time. So, the diagram feature of it, at least for me, is pretty valuable."
"I like the whole product, but specifically, I like the license part. It's very easy to acquire a license for this product."
"One thing I've noticed is that navigation can be difficult unless you are familiar with the structure that we have in place. If someone else had to look at our ActiveBatch console and find a job, they might not know where to find it."
"They have some crucial design flaws within the console that still need to be worked out because it is not working exactly how we hoped to see it, e.g., just some minor things where when you hit the save button, then all of a sudden all your job's library items collapse. Then, in order to continue on with your testing, you have to open those back up. I have taken that to them, and they are like, "Yep. We know about it. We know we have some enhancements that need to be taken care of. We have more developers now." They are working towards taking the minor things that annoy us, resolving them, and getting them fixed."
"A nice thing to have would be the ability to comfortably pass variables from one job to another. That was one of the things that I found difficult."
"There are some issues with this version and finding the jobs that it ran. If you're looking at 1,000 different jobs, it shows based on the execution time, not necessarily the run time. So, if there was a constraint waiting, you may be looking for it in the wrong time frame. Plus, with thousands of jobs showing up and the way it pages output jobs, sometimes you end up with multiple pages on the screen, then you have to go through to find the specific job you're looking for. On the opposite side, you can limit the daily activity screen to show only jobs that failed or jobs currently running, which will shrink that back down. However, we have operators who are looking at the whole nightly cycle to make sure everything is there and make sure nothing got blocked or was waiting. Sometimes, they have a hard time finding every item within the list."
"ActiveBatch is a little complex."
"Some of the advanced features in the user interface are a bit confusing even after referring to the documents."
"A cloud option is not provided as a free feature, making it a costly solution for smaller organizations."
"The user interface can be improved so that it is more appealing and accessible to new users."
"Another one that is probably a little bit bigger for me is that when there is an issue or there's an error, it writes on a different screen. I have to find the actual process name and go to a different screen to view the alert that got generated. On that screen, everyone's processes, not just the processes of the folks in my department, are thrown. It takes me a while to find the actual error so that I could go in there and look at the alert. It could be because of the way it was set up, but at least for me, it isn't too intuitive."
"In the next release, I would like to have an alert feature to indicate when an agent is down. Rocket Zena is not capable of sending alerts that the agent is down. As of now, you have manually monitor to see when the agent is down."
"The documentation has room for improvement."
"The scheduling mapping is a little disjointed. There is no wizard-type approach. There are a lot of different things that you have to do in completely different areas. They could probably add the functionality for creating all components of a mapping or an OPA schedule. The component creation could be done collectively rather than through individual components."
"The UI is not intuitive, and it would be nice if there was a web interface."
"One area where it could be improved is communication between the different servers. Sometimes there are processes that have already been completed but we get a status notification that they're still active."
"In the web interface, it stacks the tasks across the top, and they accumulate until you close or clean those out. That seems a little cumbersome. You must right-click and close all tabs constantly to keep the console clean and manage your views."
"In the next release, I would like the user experience to be improved. The user interface should be more appealing to gen-z."
ActiveBatch by Redwood is ranked 4th in Workload Automation with 35 reviews while Rocket Zena is ranked 12th in Workload Automation with 9 reviews. ActiveBatch by Redwood is rated 9.2, while Rocket Zena is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of ActiveBatch by Redwood writes "Flexible, easy to use, and offers good automation". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Rocket Zena writes "A continuously evolving, stable solution, with responsive support". ActiveBatch by Redwood is most compared with Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation, Tidal by Redwood and Redwood RunMyJobs, whereas Rocket Zena is most compared with Control-M, Rocket Zeke, IBM Workload Automation and AutoSys Workload Automation. See our ActiveBatch by Redwood vs. Rocket Zena report.
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