ActiveBatch by Redwood Reviews

Initially, we were facing a lot of difficulties in monitoring the scheduled jobs. We had to create multiple tasks for managing servers and get it done by using change requests. It was very hectic and time-consuming as we had to monitor each and every server manually. 

After implementing ActiveBatch workload automation we were able to automate all our tasks and build reliable workflows. It provides an option of triggers to eliminate errors and automate triggers based on events/actions. Monitoring, scheduling, and controlling workflows of the jobs and tasks have been simplified in half the time.

We have to monitor our backup servers on a daily basis, creating dump files and verifying all the active master servers that have gotten at least one dump parsing data entry. It's helped with checking servers with error status and analyze/fix/report and monitoring for the latest dump files in the server. These were the most time-consuming tasks and required more attention. Active Batch has helped us to automate these tasks by reducing resource usage and giving us more time for extra productive hours other than monitoring. We are able to track down the server failures easily and fix the issue within the SLA targets thereby achieving effective and improved business processes.

ActiveBatch is highly reliable and scalable for all our automation work. The tool provides excellent service management and intelligent automation for scheduling complex jobs. 

It processes heavy workloads on servers hassle-free - proving the tool's stability. 

ActiveBatch provides summary reports and logs for further analysis and improvements in monitoring servers, which is very handy. With the help of ActiveBatch, we were able to reduce a lot of scripting work for automation tasks as the tool supports max scripting.

Overall, ActiveBatch is highly recommended if you are really struggling with daily monitoring tasks.

I don't see any drawbacks with the usability, however, the documentation part can be improved with some additional guidance about the features and their usage. I have faced struggles to understand, set up the tool, and implement it in my early days as a new user. 

The UI also could be a little more advanced in the next release along with some video tutorials - such as providing a user guide. 

I am using ActiveBatch for two years.

Customer support is good. We were able to get in touch with them when we had queries.

We did not use any software before; it was completely manual.

As a beginner, the setup was pretty hard due to a lack of deep guidance or documentation.

After automating, we are able to achieve our SLA targets thereby reducing the SLA breach and increasing the KPI by 98% - which is a great ROI.

Setting up the environment was quite hard initially. The pricing seemed to be pretty decent in the market for all our requirements. The licensing is easy as it can be chosen according to the plan that makes the most sense.

We evaluated other software, however, ActiveBatch seemed to be a perfect fit for our requirements.

Active Batch is my go-to option for all my automation-related work.

We have a security project where we need to perform daily scans on a number of our servers and network infrastructure components and keep a check on their health and status. We have implemented the ActiveBatch to perform endpoint security scans on our environment for each and every component and provide us with a detailed report stating their health as well as updating on that server and components that need upgrades. We have scheduled the scans to take place every 12 hours on a daily basis and provide the major stakeholder with detailed reports. 

ActiveBatch has really improved our project by automating the endpoint security scans on our servers and also other components of our environment. 

Being a security project we should have a complete picture of the health of each and every component as well as the servers that need to be upgraded to avoid any malware attacks on non-upgraded servers due to existing vulnerabilities. This has saved associates a number of critical business hours that can be used to concentrate on critical business tasks rather than spending them performing repetitive security scans.

The automation feature is a very valuable feature as the associates do not have to worry about performing repetitive tasks (i.e. endpoint security scans on a daily basis) that would take several hours to complete on a daily basis.

It is also faster and more efficient in conducting endpoint security scans compared to associates who perform it manually, reducing the scope of error and also providing a detailed report on each and every component present in our environment. The reports are very detailed and visually appealing that is shared with major stakeholders.

This product is the gold standard of all the automation tools around. You can schedule jobs easily. It is faster and also more efficient. The product also provides a detailed dashboard after the endpoint security scans are performed. 

The only service that needs improvement is integration support. There are very few documents that provide us with detailed information on the troubleshooting of errors that occur during integration with the existing environment. The team could create more documents and also publish blogs to support customers with queries. 

I've used the solution for less than a year.

ActiveBatch Workload Automation can be used to increase productivity and for optimum utilization of any IT processes. It provides a centralized platform to monitor, manage and automate the process. With its REST API adapters, It has the ability to integrate with various platforms such as Microsoft, ServiceNow, AWS, Teradata, and many more.

The pre-defined job steps are a superb add-on that saves time and effort in identifying, analyzing, optimizing, preparing, and monitoring the automation process.

Team members with expertise in different tools and server processors are working and monitoring the project via a centralized platform, which means the processes are now agile and instant correction or remediations are being made on the same. This is helping us accelerate and save time, money, and effort.

The user interface is the cherry on the cake as it facilitates simple steps such as drag and drop and scheduling the job. This enables any team member to get accustomed to the tool as quickly as possible.

There are hundreds of pre-built steps. The tool provides an extensive library of pre-built job steps that are ready to go. This is helping me save massive time in identifying the necessity, analyzing the process, defining the process, creating the script, preparing and running the process, etc. Now, the team does not have to create the script and we've eliminated the risk of manual or human error. 

The job scheduling option is easier to allocate jobs and monitor the job. At the same time, it also reminds us of the same.

ActiveBatch provides 24/7 customer support; however it can be enhanced as it is not always easy to get the queries resolved using AI. They need to not rely on AI and provide technical support. An organization like ours would prefer to hear back from an expert either by email or phone to get a response to the queries directly.

They could provide an easier installation guide or technical support to the organizations during the installation process. Due to security checks and various security enablers, it becomes a tedious task to install the software.

I've used the solution for one year.

The prices are competitive (lower) than other tools in the market.

ActiveBatch is used for multiple purposes, including as SAP jobs, file transfer systems (FTP), and data warehouse loads. 

ActiveBatch has numerous functionalities that support different types of workflows, including batch calls and service calls. 

The format of job scheduling is well organized and very similar to what we use in everyday life hence making it easy to use. It is able to control jobs for multiple environments over and across different servers.

We can use and set up automated remediation and alerts for operations that we have created.

ActiveBatch has reduced work by providing automated workflows across several different applications. ActiveBatch also has some of the triggers, such as FTP file triggers, message queue triggers, and so on, to run jobs sequentially, making sure they will be handled in a reliable way. 

It sets up alerts for operational peace of mind. It also has custom rules that we can apply to advanced data/time scheduling and fiscal calendar. 

The best feature that it has solved is the ability to trigger jobs upon completion of warehouse nightly batch jobs.

ActiveBatch has numerous capabilities in the automation tool environment. A normal IT person can only scratch the surface of the tool, whereas a developer who has knowledge of the development of the application over a cloud will likely be able to utilize the maximum of the automation tool. 

There are many of the major utilities, like file transfer systems, job scheduling systems, and others triggers that are amazing to use.

The documentation is very limited, and it can be improved. 

The service for Level One support could be made more reachable. Service pack updates are sometimes hidden/undocumented. This can cause some of the jobs to break up after the SP is installed. They need to ensure users are using the technical support to configure everything at the initial usage. It is sometimes hard to set up permission levels.

I've used the solution for one year.

It does a little bit of everything. We have everything from console apps that our developers create to custom jobs built directly in ActiveBatch, which go through the process of moving data off of cloud servers, like SFTP, onto our on-premise servers so we can ingest them into other workflows, console apps, or whatever the business needs.

We use it company-wide. With us being a financial organization, we rely on a bunch of data from some of our parent companies that process transactions for us. We are able to bring all that data into our system, no matter what department it is from, e.g., we have things from the IT department that we want to do maintenance on, such as clearing out the logs in IAS on the Exchange Server, to being able to move millions of dollars with automation.

If there is a native tool for it, then we try to use it. We have purchased the SharePoint, VMware, and ServiceNow modules. Wherever we find that we can't connect in because the native APIs aren't there, we have been using PowerShell to strip those rows out into an array of variables that have worked pretty well. So far, we have not found a spot where we can't hook in to have it do the tasks that we are asking it to do.

We have only really tapped into SharePoint native integration because we haven't gotten to the depths of being able to use the ServiceNow and some of the other integrations. However, being able to use the native plugins has been very helpful. It saves us from having to write a PowerShell script to do the functionality that we are looking to do. We are really trained to write it, because within the old process that we used to use, we would do a lot of PowerShell as the old tool just wouldn't do what we're asking it to do. We are finding a lot of processes within ActiveBatch are now replacing those PowerShell scripts because ActiveBatch can just do it. We don't have to teach it how to do it.

We can do things within ActiveBatch, not having to teach it everything. That is the biggest thing that we've been learning with it: It's easy to use and its workflows work a lot better. The other day, we ran into a problem where Citrix ShareFile, which is one of our SFTP locations, was being stupid where it would disconnect from the SFTP server. It was all just a time out. Well, ActiveBatch has a process included where we can troubleshoot the connection failures and have itself heal enough to be able to get the data off of the SFTP server. Being able to discover the functionalities of ActiveBatch self-healing has been a lifesaver for us.

We have so many different processes out there with so many different schedules. My boss looked at it one day and noticed there was somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 processes a day. The solution gives us that single pane of glass to see everything under one spot because we have four execution agents constantly running, so there are processes happening at all times of the day and night.

We are actively monitoring all our ActiveBatch processes using SolarWinds Orion. If a process doesn't run, a service is not running on one particular execution agent, etc., Orion will alert us to that. I don't think that we have set up anything too major within ActiveBatch to figure out what is going on. I know that we have HA across everything. So, we are running four execution agents and two jobs schedulers. Having all that stuff put together, then it does failover to the other location if there is a problem with one of the sites.

The most valuable feature is being able to ingest some PowerShell scripting into variables that we can then utilize in loops. Our first rendition of doing PowerShell into variables was being able to pull some Active Directory computers using a PowerShell script and Active Directory PowerShell modules, then we were able to take that and dump it into a SharePoint list, because we keep inventory of all our servers. It was through the process of trying to understand how to get something out of PowerShell into an array and being able to process that out into something else that it would become useful down the road.

There are some things that ActiveBatch can't do natively, which is no fault to them. It's just the fact that we're trying to do things that just don't exist in ActiveBatch. With us being proficient in PowerShell scripting, we were able to extend the ActiveBatch environment to be able to say, "We'll run this PowerShell script and get the array that we're looking for, but then take that and do something native within ActiveBatch that can ultimately meet our goals."

The ease of use has been pretty good. I have been able to create workflows and utilize different modules within the job library, which has worked out really well. 

ActiveBatch's ability to automate predictable, repeatable processes is good. It does that very nicely. A lot of what we do is we pull files down from SFTP servers and put them onto our local file servers. Based on that, we are able to run a console app that developers have written, which is a lot more complicated, for doing various tasks. Our console apps are easy to set up because we have templates already drawn up. So, if we just right click into our task folder, we can quickly create an item in there that we can start up for doing an automation feature. Just being able to use PowerShell to drop variables into the ActiveBatch process has worked really well now that we understand it.

I know that there are some improvements that I have brought back to the development team that they want to work on. The graphical interface has some hiccups that we have been noticing on our side, and it seems a little bit bloated. 

While the console app works well, 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.

We did a proof of concept back in April.

We are in the process of migrating all our old processes over to ActiveBatch. The solution is in production, and we do have workloads on it.

It is pretty stable. Now that we have worked through the details and ensured that we can do a failover to let the process do what it needs to do, we haven't seen any problems with it.

We are about 90 percent done migrating our processes.

Right now, we have four execution agents, and they are sitting pretty idle for the most part. If we find that we're starting to see taxed resources on our execution agents, then we have the capability of spinning up more. So, we can run hundreds of servers and automation, if we wanted to.

There are only three of us who have been working with ActiveBatch, which is a good fit. We have one admin who is a developer first, then admin second. Then, there are two of us, who are server people first and developers second. All three of us manage all the different job libraries out there.

In the entire organization, there are about 1,300 of us using the different processes. A lot of people who would be more hands-on are the IT department, mainly because we are directly involved with all the different console apps. We have actually got a significant number of console apps, just because SCORCH couldn't do some of the things that ActiveBatch can do, so our developer teams went in and created the console app. At this point, all that ActiveBatch really needed to do was to be able to run an executable and provide an exit code on it, then let us know if it fails. There are some other business units who are involved a bit more along the way due to the movement of money, for example.

It is heavily used, at least in terms of what is out there. There is a lot of interest in adoption of using it in the future along with a lot of processes that people are really pushing to get put into ActiveBatch. They still have the mentality that a lot of it needs to be done as a console app. However, with us just ending the migration phase of things, we are trying to just get everything moved over so we can shut down the servers. Then, the next step in the future, probably 2021, we'll end up focusing on what ActiveBatch can do without us having to write a console app. 75 percent of the time, we could have ActiveBatch do it natively. There is just a matter of getting a lot of the IT developers to feel comfortable with adopting it as a platform.

I am working with them on their tech support. We have a customer advocate with whom we have been working. She has been awesome. We have had some issues where tech support will suggest one thing, then we are sitting there scratching our heads, going, "Do we really need to go that complicated on a solution?" Then, we reach out to our customer advocate, who comes back, saying, "No, this is how you really need to do it. I'm going to take this ticket and go train that tech support person. So, in the future, you don't get the answer you did." Therefore, their tech support is a bit rough around the edges, but I foresee in the next six months to a year, they will be on their game and able to provide exactly the answers within the timeframe that we expect.

We see ActiveBatch as the Center of Excellence for all things related to automation for our business. It is the best solution that we have had compared to what we were running before, which was Microsoft System Center Orchestrator (SCORCH). We don't want to have a whole bunch of different solutions out there. Being able to have one solution that can do all our automation is the best way to do it.

We switched over because of the intelligence. We were right in the middle of trying to decide whether we were going to upgrade SCORCH to the latest version or if it was time for us to go a different path. As we started going down through the different requirements that we needed SCORCH to do, we decided that it was time for us to go in a different direction. SCORCH had to be taught everything you wanted it to do, whereas there are a lot of processes that ActiveBatch will just go ahead and handle.

The performance is about the same between the two solutions in terms of doing what they are supposed to do. Where we really have the advantage is the fact that we don't have to reinvent the wheel, e.g., triggers within Active Batch are native and can be set up pretty quickly and easily. Whereas with SCORCH, we struggled with trying to get a schedule setup for that trigger or being able to rely on constraints. For example, if a file doesn't exist, then you really can't do anything. In SCORCH, we had to teach it that if you don't see a file, then hold on a second because we have to wait. Where ActiveBatch just says, "Oh, okay. I know how to do that."

In certain cases, ActiveBatch has resulted in an improvement in workflow completion times, because of the error retries. We can take care of them by telling ActiveBatch that if you have a problem, go ahead, try it again, and modify this. If the job runs at two o'clock in the morning and it failed with SCORCH, we always had to go back, figure out what happened, and how to get it run again. It might have been something as stupid as no network connection, because one of our upstream providers had an outage. Whereas, at least with ActiveBatch, we have been able to build in that self-healing or error detection. Once it sees the connection, it can go ahead and just correct the problem. For example, the Internet might go down from 2:00 AM to 2:15 AM, then by 2:30 AM, it's all back up and running. ActiveBatch can go ahead and finish the task. Where with SCORCH, we were finding that it would fail. Then, at seven o'clock in the morning, we got to troubleshoot any issues that might have come up. 

A lot of times, troubleshooting did not take very long, as it depended on the process. If it's something that could be downloaded from the SFTP, then that relied on several other steps that needed to take place. That might have delayed it a bit because we had to walk through five different processes that normally would have been scheduled to run at 3:00 AM versus 2:00 AM. So, if the Internet is out between 2:00 AM and 2:15 AM, ActiveBatch heals that first process before the second one runs at 3:00 AM. Then, we don't have to go through and do any added troubleshooting because step one didn't work, and step two failed because we can't troubleshoot it until we get up and start looking at it that day.

The initial setup was straightforward.

It took two to three hours to deploy, by the time we had all the intricacies done that we wanted.

We knew that we wanted it to be highly available in two data centers for DR purposes, because some of these processes move millions of dollars of money between accounts (in various pieces for wire transfers). I think HA was the big thing that we were trained to ensure that our strategy was based around. 

The only other strategy was the fact that we have multiple environments that we go through to test our solution out first. When we are done, we export/promote it up to the production environment.

The good part was that we really didn't have to do the install because we ended up getting a proof of concept setup with one of their engineers. So, we didn't have to do the initial setup ourselves, but we did build two other environments: one in our test environment and one in our development environment. Based on the fact that we walked through it the first time with the proof of concept, I was able to go back and reproduce every step that they walked us through on day one to build out the test and dev environments.

I have absolutely seen ROI. Coming from the admin point of view, it has streamlined the process of being able to just implement something instead of having to teach the software how to do its job. From our point, I know that I have implemented a couple of different processes that were not a migration piece, and it's been fairly easy for us to deploy because we know what the business unit wants to do with it. For us to implement, it takes us about 20 minutes to get it perfected on my side, then I can have developers run with it, test it, and figure out what their code was doing to make it happen. So, the biggest thing is that it is easy to use.

I know that there are enough processes out there that it's worth a gold mine. We can automate just about anything that we would ever want to. If we wanted the lights to turn on at a certain time, we could go ahead and turn the lights on at a certain time, and it would just happen.

ActiveBatch's Self-Service Portal allows our business units to run and monitor their own workloads. They can simply run and review the logs, but they can't modify them. It increases their productivity because they are able to take care of things on their own. It saves us time from having to rerun the scripts, because the business units can just go ahead and log in, then rerun it themselves. 

This solution improves our job success rate percentage. The biggest thing is having built-in capabilities of error detection, retries, and the ability to self-heal.

ActiveBatch has saved us man-hours. We don't have to rerun some of these scripts on behalf of the business unit. Or, if there is a script that fails, it can go ahead and self-heal, fixing itself. That is all unaccounted for troubleshooting time while helping our business units. 

The pricing was fair. 

There are additional costs for the plugins. We have the standard licensing fees for different pieces, then we have the plugins which were add-ons. However, we expected that.

We had a consultant come in and try to share with us all the different tools. However, there isn't a lot of competition out there for automation capabilities.

A major component was that the vendor is thinking five years ahead, looking to future-proof our business. When we were making our decision, we were either ready to go with either upgrading SCORCH or a different path. We wanted to be in connection with an organization who had a long-term plan. We didn't want to revisit this in one to three years down the road.

We have been able to learn it pretty quickly. We were kind of thrown right in after we got the proof of concept up and going. We had a couple of use cases drawn up and implemented, and they showed us how to do it. Our boss ended up buying the software, and said, "Ready, set, go. We're going to start migrating all these different processes over." We really didn't get time to learn it. Based on what we knew about our previous application that we were using for automation, we were able to step right in and do the best we could. We have been doing weekly, one- to two-hour sessions where three of us get together, just understand the solution, and try to work through all the details. We have been able to learn it pretty quickly without having too much training or knowledge.

We have gone through and given the business units a demo of what the possibilities are for sharing knowledge and ideas. At the end of the day, there is a team of three of us who are actually implementing all the processes so we keep a kind of standard. However, to give a business unit an idea of what the functionality is and how we could best utilize it, we at least give them the 30,000 foot view of what ActiveBatch could do, then we build it.

We mainly use it for console apps, but we haven't explored them in real depth. I know that we could get even deeper. At some point down the road, a lot of the console apps that our developer teams create will more than likely become native ActiveBatch processes which we will no longer need the console apps to run.

For the admins, the biggest lesson learnt would be in those first 30 days going through and learning through the Academy. They have an online Academy that they have out on their website. The biggest struggle that we had was just the fact that we were trying to do this migration not knowing all the different features of the software. We ran into trouble where we would try and implement something (and we wanted to do it by best practices because we want to get it right the first time), but there were features that we were discovering along the way that we had no idea about until all of a sudden we needed that feature. Then, we would go back, and go, "Oh, you know what? That last procedure that we just implemented. It would've been really cool if we would have known that at the time."

If we would have taken the first 30 to 60 days, or even a week long crash course, in ActiveBatch development to get all the highlights of everything that the software could physically do, that would have helped us immensely just to make sure that we knew what was going on and how it worked. We probably would have implemented some of our migrations a little differently than we have them done today. So, we will have to circle back and revisit some of those processes and reinvent them.

Take that time and learn the solution. Make sure you understand the software, at least at a higher level, maybe not the 30,000 foot view, but maybe the 1,000 foot view and get through the Academy first. Once you get through the Academy, then you can go ahead and start implementing the job libraries and how you want it to lay out and be implemented. Even after nine months of working with the software, we're still discovering features that we wish we would have known nine months ago coming into the migration.

I would probably rate the software as a nine and a half or 10. I would rate the tech support as probably a six, but they are improving immensely. If I had to give it an overall score, I would go with an eight (out of 10).

We used the solution extensively in material planning, material transfer, SCM activities (such as outsourcing, purchasing, OEM reworks, production planning, manufacturing BOMs, work order closures, calculating and identifying SLE of material, scrap stores, customer and supplier tracks, finance, invoice billing, and securely managing data processing and data transfer). 

The main issue we encountered was that we users could not customize the software as needed as different organizations have different working cultures and different aerospace standards to maintain. Therefore, for any new improvements, we had to contact the service engineer and discuss the requirements. Except for this, the other functions were fantastic, with a little software training to understand the purpose of each function.

I'd like to share positive feedback on this, since the negative side is so minor. On the positive side, this tool is very much necessary for all manufacturing and production companies, and I strongly recommend it as the uses and functions of this tool are vast and can be used in almost all departments in the organization, including stores, business development, SCM, purchase, PPC, manufacturing, quality, finance, program management, and so on.

It has definitely improved my working culture by easily getting the job done.

The automation of ActiveBatch workloads is great. 

The user interface is exceptional; it is very secure and data leak-proof, which is very important to any organization. It is very useful in sending confidential files through FPP servers. 

There are no multiple login issues. You can easily identify who is accessing your login, if any. 

It aids in the great planning of our daily activities.

One more important feature is to get the summary report and presentations, which greatly helped in improving production work.

The product should be improved by providing a customization option. It would be very helpful in getting our own options as required.

The software can still be more user-friendly. By providing training, we could explore as many options as possible, and the mistakes could be more easily avoided.

Pricing can be minimized a bit.

Instead of having to upgrade each of the execution agents, there should be a mechanism in place where the agents are automatically updated when a new version is released.

Otherwise, it is very good software.

I've used the solution for over a year.

The stability is good.

I'd rate the scalability eight out of ten.

Customer support is pretty good. We have no concerns.

Positive

As the organization changes, we tend to use the most efficient software which is available. 

The initial setup was pretty straightforward, with no major difficulties encountered.

We handled the setup in-house.

The product is definitely worth the money.

The product is a bit costly.

I've also evaluated SAP HANA, ERP, and Oracle.

We have around 20 scheduled jobs we run every few hours. These include our price fetching jobs, market tracking jobs, subscription checking jobs, profit calculation jobs, etc. These are pretty long scripts with complex instructions to handle multiple data from a different database, microservice APIs, and many public market exchange APIs. All this data crunching was difficult to perform and maintain before ActiveBatch, however, once we started using ActiveBatch workload automation software, scheduling these jobs and tracking data crunching became easy. 

ActiveBatch has improved our organization by making job scheduling and API integrations very easy to use and to get started with. Earlier, we needed to assign these tasks to a high-paying highly-skilled resource. Now, we can train anyone to do the same job with very little effort. Our operation costs are significantly reduced because of ActiveBatch. Now, anyone can complete automation tasks without much knowledge of how computer API works and with no knowledge of coding. This has made our automation easier.

Some of the features we found useful for our use case are:

• Job scheduling. It has helped with scheduling complex jobs with simple scripts.
• API integration. It is very easy to set up regular Rest API calls and data gathering.
• Time Savings. Tracking multiple servers for downtime and multiple jobs logs is very time-consuming. We have to switch between multiple tabs and applications for all this. However, ActiveBatch made it very easy to track the downtime of our own services and logs of our cron jobs very easily. 

Overall, we found these valuable

Some improvements can be made to the user interface. I personally love to see ActiveBatch keep up with current trends in UI development. 

Also, some improvements can definitely can be made to make ActiveBatch more beginner friendly.

The custom theme could be a new feature suggestion for ActiveBatch.

Apart from these, I don't have any suggestions for ActiveBatch. They did a pretty good job of giving the best state-of-the-art features. All of these features are very well thought out and very useful

I've used the solution for two years.

The stability is great.

The scalability is great. We are onboarding new users, and our number of jobs is growing. We have not faced any problems.

Technical support offers great support with a fast response time.

Positive

ActiveBatch is the first software of this nature that I have used. 

The initial setup is straightforward.

We handled the implementation with an in-house team.

ActiveBatch gave us a good ROI in our organization.

The features provided in ActiveBatch are worth buying, and the cost makes sense for the number of features provided.

We did some research on VMware and IBM Workload Automation.

ActiveBatch has a fantastic interface allowing us to efficiently create, manage and monitor workflows. It also offers a drag-and-drop visual workflow designer, enabling users to create complex workflows without coding quickly.    

We can integrate this with various platforms and technologies, including Windows, Linux, Unix, and SQL Server, and this makes it a flexible tool that can be used to automate a variety of IT processes. 

ActiveBatch helped us automate and schedule routine tasks such as data backups, file transfers, database updates, and report generation, which frees IT staff to focus on other studies.

The most valuable feature of ActiveBatch Workload Automation software is its pre-built job steps. The software comes with an extensive library of pre-built job steps that can be used to automate processes in various systems and applications. Due to this, users won't need to create their scripts, which can save time and lower the possibility of errors.

ActiveBatch is a little complex. A steep learning curve can be associated with using ActiveBatch, and it may take some time for a few users to become proficient with the tool.    

Apart from that, I can easily say that ActiveBatch is the best in the business. 

I've used the solution for more than a year.

Overall it is a stable, great solution.

It is a very good, scalable solution.

Technical support is great.

Positive

Previously I was using a different solution.

I switched since that solution was slow and also the cost was more.

The setup is straightforward.

We deployed the solution with the help of an expert.

This solution is better compared to other software.

We mainly evaluated options based on the cost and flexibility of the software.

The primary use case would be for monitoring the servers along with alerts and logs. Earlier, I had to do a lot of work on this manually and it was very time-consuming. Since the ActiveBatch Workload Automation has been implemented,  everything is smooth.

Also, we use it for job scheduling and server maintenance. This has been good. More than anything, when managing workload balance and multiple platforms, this solution helps me to avoid switching across platforms and keeps an eye on them as the tool automatically takes care of it.

Apart from this, the integrations for APIs have been very helpful as well.

Implementing this solution has been a real improvement in the work we do. This tool helps reduce the manual workload, and operational skills have been reduced as well. Now, the focus is more on developmental and deployment work.

Also, since this work has a multiplatform tool for scheduling, the jobs across platforms have been easy to handle. This has reduced a lot of micro-managing on these apps, and the amount of manual work is also reduced.

Plus, since the scalability is also automated, the team has benefitted when growing.

I use this product for multi-purpose functions. Some of the best features are:

• Workload processing
• scalability
• intelligent automation
• administration console
• workflow management
• service management
• proactive workflows
• error alerts
• service management
• job scheduling
• API integrations
• integrations
• multi-platform scheduling

Since I started using this product, I have been able to easily track everything as it mainly monitors, alerts, and looks after all the services - even across platform scheduling - which has helped me immensely.

The only issue I have is the price. It is a bit high compared to the other similar tools, yet the use case has been brilliant compared to others.

An additional feature would be the easy download of the data. I'd like to see that in this as a tool. 

Except for the GUI, everything looks good.

I have been using this product for around nine months.

The solution is very stable and dependable.

This is a good product. Since the scalability is automated, we do not have to wait on the alerts and manually increase the size.

Technical support offers great service.

Positive

I did use AWS and ServiceNow, and the switch is due to the fact that this has improved my time management very efficiently.

The initial setup was not much of an issue.

We did the implementation via an in-house team.

This solution is really worth the money.

It is worth the money; go for it.

We ask the company to please try to reduce the cost and provide it as a tool rather than a web interface. 

We use ActiveBatch Workload Automation primarily for managing work schedules.

ActiveBatch Workload Automation improved the organization I worked in because it's able to manage complex workflow automation even with a lot of cross-dependencies and hundreds of processes running. ActiveBatch Workload Automation is a very good tool in the Windows environment.

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.

An area for improvement in ActiveBatch Workload Automation is its interface or GUI. It could be a little better.

There isn't any additional feature I'd like to see in the tool, except for the GUI, everything looks good.

I've been using ActiveBatch Workload Automation since 2009.

ActiveBatch Workload Automation has very good stability.

ActiveBatch Workload Automation is a scalable solution.

The technical support for ActiveBatch Workload Automation is very good.

We didn't use a different solution before using ActiveBatch Workload Automation.

The initial setup for ActiveBatch Workload Automation was straightforward.

Our deployment for ActiveBatch Workload Automation was done in-house.

I've seen ROI from ActiveBatch Workload Automation. It's a very good tool.

I don't have information on the licensing costs of ActiveBatch Workload Automation because a different team handles that.

We evaluated other solutions, but we went with ActiveBatch Workload Automation because it suits our environment.

I'm using version 12 of ActiveBatch Workload Automation.

Ten to fifteen people use ActiveBatch Workload Automation within the company. Between three to four people take care of the deployment and maintenance of the solution. Right now, there isn't any plan to increase the usage of ActiveBatch Workload Automation.

My advice to anyone looking to implement ActiveBatch Workload Automation is that it's a good tool for small requirements, for example, a few hundred scheduling workflows. For that, it should be a good tool, with good stability.

I'm rating ActiveBatch Workload Automation as eight out of ten.