ActiveBatch by Redwood Reviews

ActiveBatch is used for scheduling our nightly batch processes. That is our main use at this point. It includes billing, processing, claims, commission statements, and a lot of reporting. It's all tied into that batch process.

We do use the built-in REST call process for nightly printing, coming out of that batch cycle. We distribute the nightly reports out of the batch cycle to different departments using ActiveBatch. It's used for FTP processing every week coming out of the weekly commissions process.

The most important part to us is to keep those nightly batch cycles in an easy to read format, which is where ActiveBatch Plans come into play. We run these cycles in four different environments, from development to production and a couple stops in between. Keeping all of those jobs separate from one another is key for us.

Outside of batch, we do run a process every five minutes throughout the day during business hours to scrape data from our mainframe entry system to our new policy administration system. As people enter claims into the mainframe system, those claims get moved over within five minutes, rather than waiting for the mainframe batch cycle to run that night and those claims not being seen until the next day. That saves us up to 24 hours. The business end-users can get that data within five minutes now.

ActiveBatch has allowed us to move forward quickly with our modernization effort, to get off of the mainframe and to move that data to a distributed environment. It has been huge for us to use ActiveBatch to run these nightly processes: everything from Dev to QA, UAT, and Production. Those are all cycles that we run every night to allow different users to test processes that they're working on in each of those stages, to get them into production and off the mainframe.

With the systems we're using now, it's a lot easier with ActiveBatch. The mainframe is so manual. If there's a problem with some mainframe code, it requires a call to a developer, but our new system works great with ActiveBatch because everything is built into that system. There's no JCL code or mainframe COBOL code, up front. Our batches just work seamlessly between ActiveBatch and our new administration system. We've had no problem with our batch processing from that point of view. Whereas with the mainframe, it's a struggle at times. If we have a problem with a job and it cancels, we may be waiting three hours for a developer to get online, troubleshoot, test, and get a fix in place so we can finish the cycle. We've not had that issue with ActiveBatch.

A lot of the built-in processes are among the most valuable features because when just starting out, although I went through the ActiveBatch Boot Camp — and I've got a couple of other people who went through it as well — it was a little overwhelming, not having used the product.

We found it easier once we were using the product and then doing refreshers on the Boot Camp or doing the deep dives that ActiveBatch provides. Even the Knowledge Base articles allow us to grow and let us know what we can use in our environment.

We're able to use the Plans, rather than seeing individual jobs within all four of our environments. Seeing all of these jobs individually would be overwhelming to try to easily decipher workflows, whereas everything is nested nicely within each Plan for us. It makes it very easy to read the next day, and to look at how each cycle ran. It also helps with troubleshooting if there's an issue with one of them at night.

As far as centralization goes it's nice because we can see all these processes that are tied to this larger process. The commissions, FTP processing, the reporting, the file moves to the business users — all that is right there. It's very easy to read. It's easy to tie it together, visually, and see where each of these steps fits into the bigger picture.

Other important features for us are file triggers, file constraints, and job constraints, because of the sequential nature of the batch process. The file triggers have made our processes more efficient and reduced delays. It might be minimal at this point, but it would still be a manual process that would have had to be done. Our second-shift operator would have to wait each night for that mainframe cycle to finish and then manually trigger certain processes within each of our ActiveBatch cycles.

It's also a very flexible product. We're just over a year in and we're still getting our feet wet and realizing its potential. One thing I am anxious to roll out — and I've tried to push some business end-user meetings, but it's still a little early in the process as everyone has been so busy with the overall modernization effort — is the Self-Service Portal. It will allow the business users to run processes on-demand, rather than putting in a ticket to have IT do it for them. This would also allow other IT users to see any processes they may be testing, in the ActiveBatch environment.

In addition, the Jobs Library has been a tremendous asset. For the most part, that's what we use. There are some outliers, but we pretty much integrate those Jobs Library steps throughout the process, whether it's REST calls, FTP processes, or file copies and moves. We do use some process job steps to call out external batch processing through external scripts, but most of what we're using is what is built-in, at this point. That has helped us to build end-to-end workflows.

When our mainframe process ends each night it sends out an email to certain users that the system is up, so that they can log on and do work on the mainframe at that point. We tried to use that email as a trigger for our ActiveBatch printing processes but it didn't work out too well. I believe it ended up being a bug that they're going to address in a future release.

But at the same time, that was an easy fix. We were able to change that from an email trigger to a file trigger. Now we have the mainframe job, in addition to sending out that email, create four text files that will trigger our four batch cycles through ActiveBatch. That has worked out great for us.

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. That being said, I have been using that search function a lot lately. That search function is definitely your friend.

I have been using ActiveBatch for about a year-and-a-half.

I've not had any major issues with ActiveBatch at all. It seems extremely stable. We've not had any downtime. We've had issues here and there with different processes, but nothing that has affected the overall environment. Granted, we don't have very many users on it; it's mostly processing at this point.

In terms of bandwidth, we've not had an issue. There are no limitations that I can see.

The email support can be hit-or-miss. Overall, I've had a pretty good experience with it. They're quick to reply and they let you know exactly what they need. You get it to them and they dig into it and get back to you. Sometimes it can be cumbersome emailing back and forth and waiting for replies. Overall, it's been good.

We didn't have a previous solution.

We were looking for a product that could handle a company-wide insurance systems modernization project. This project has been in the making for years. It boiled down to putting new products on our distributed systems, migrating data from the mainframe to those distributed systems, and eventually sun-setting the mainframe. This approach makes more sense since it's simpler to start with new products rather than migration to begin with and this also allowed us a nice starting point with ActiveBatch.

Out-of-the-box, it was a challenge to understand the best way to structure it for our system. Obviously you don't know what you don't know. Once we started using it, we realized the best way to lay it out for ourselves and it became easier and easier over time. I've had to move things around a great deal to make it easier because we weren't sure, when starting, how to set it up, as far as our environment goes with its file structure and object structure.

As far as objects go, it's pretty straightforward. It's like any other file structure. It's just a matter of knowing what you need for your environment, which is something you learn as you go: You need these things in this folder, you need those items in that folder. Do you want all your FTP processes in one folder or do you want them underneath a certain project that they're tied to?

As far as setup and configuration go, they're very straightforward. I've never seen an issue with that or with upgrading.

The planning stage took a while. We got the product and then I and another operator went through the training, which we did in a week. The actual deployment has been scattered. The initial deployment went well, but it was staggered because there were, and still are, different pieces flowing in, a little at a time. It won't be really set until we get all of our business on this platform. It's as set as it can be right now. The actual deployment slowly fell into place. I hate to say it took two months to deploy this product. It didn't. But to get to where we were comfortable running that first batch cycle, it probably did, but that's no fault of ActiveBatch. That's just developers getting the pieces to us and then us figuring out how to use ActiveBatch in the most efficient manner.

We implemented ActiveBatch on our own, but we did work closely with the provider of our new policy administration system and learning how the two products would work together for batch processing. I have worked very closely with someone there to tie in with ActiveBatch. I don't believe he had experience with ActiveBatch prior to that, but one of his coworkers did and he called on that coworker from time to time. We mostly worked on using ActiveBatch to call those external processes through the scripts that were provided to us. That's where we had to get them involved because that was also a new product to us, and it still is. So we were trying to learn how that product worked, how ActiveBatch worked, and how to get them to work together.

For ActiveBatch there were five or six people within Operations/Infrastructure involved in the deployment. We're a small-to-midsize company with a couple of hundred employees.

It's hard to say how many hours it has saved because it is new. There have been a lot of hours put into learning the product. For instance, putting SSIS packages in has required a lot of Knowledge Base research on ActiveBatch's site. The Knowledge Base is tremendous there. I've really never had an issue finding plenty of information, sometimes more than enough information, to decipher. But in terms of man-hours, at this point, it's just figuring out the system and how to set up these jobs to work together. Those savings will definitely really be seen down the road.

But our return on investment is because it has allowed us to move forward with this project. Even with just using new business, it's allowed us to move incredibly fast when it comes to putting these batch processes in place. So far there's limited data and each cycle runs in 10-20 minutes, but at the same time, on the back end, it's providing that foundation. So we'll know what we need to do when we have more data. For example, currently, load-balancing is counterproductive. There's so little processing going on that it would take longer to load balance this 10-minute cycle than it would be to just run straight through.

The cost is outside the scope of my job responsibilities. Obviously we're using it, so it was worth the cost. I think it's a tremendous product. I don't know what the cost is compared to others, but having seen the results, it's worth it.

We recently signed up for the certification courses and training, which is money well spent. Anything involving training is money well spent, but especially with a new product that is going to be a major part of your environment and your business. From what I've seen, the videos and online training through ActiveBatch are tremendous. They provide examples, and they actually provide a test environment with jobs that you can put into ActiveBatch. You're able to run these jobs, make changes to them and work through the training with them.

Maybe at a higher level in our company there was some research into other solutions and came to ActiveBatch as the best solution. As far as I know, it has always been ActiveBatch. I was hearing that name long before we had it in hand.

Jump in. That's what we did and we're seeing the results. I can't stress enough how much it's allowed us to move forward with this modernization project. Overall, it really has been seamless. There have been a lot of hours on my part, learning the system and researching different processes that I need to put in place for the cycles. But to anyone else, the end result probably appears seamless. It is a lot of work learning it, especially if you have no prior knowledge of enterprise job schedulers and that type of flow. But ActiveBatch provides a wealth of information; their Knowledge Base is tremendous. The support gets back to you pretty much immediately. It might take them a couple of days here and there while they're researching or working with their engineers to replicate a problem.

And sign up for the training, for sure, as well as the additional training certification. In the year since I took the Boot Camp and worked my way through putting this in place to meet our immediate needs, when I revisited the Boot Camp, I found there was a ton of stuff that you forget that you can be using. In that initial Boot Camp, you're really not sure exactly what you're going to use it for. Once you start seeing ActiveBatch processes in your system and go through that training again, you realize, "Oh yeah, I can definitely see where I can tie this in," or "Yeah, we can definitely use that here or we could use this function in this way instead of that way." It will definitely help you become more efficient.

It's easy to learn the basics. It's just a matter of knowing what you need to know, what you need to use it for. At that point the ball is in your court because, while it can definitely be challenging, at the same time it's very rewarding to see things fall into place the way you pictured them. It is a very powerful tool and we've only barely scratched the surface. Keep learning. I'm learning more and more processes within ActiveBatch every day. It's definitely an ongoing process.

What I've learned from using ActiveBatch is that the sky's the limit. With all the additional, third-party licenses — Active Directory, System Manager — at this point it seems endless for us. I honestly don't know where we would be without it at this point.

We just started testing SSIS packages, as we're trying to move those off of the SQL environment and into ActiveBatch, rather than setting up schedules within SQL. We started testing one, out-of-the-box, and we're ready to move that to production this week. There will be more after that.

We aren't leveraging the cloud. We are trying to get into that area but, at the same time, we're focused on this part of our modernization project right now, getting off of the mainframe first and onto the distributed systems. Then we can take it another step. We don't have any of those additional licenses for integration with things like SharePoint, Informatica, or ServiceNow. Those options are definitely something my manager has his finger on. He knows those are available and he realizes ActiveBatch can definitely be leveraged to a greater extent.

Our developers work outside of ActiveBatch. It's mostly me who puts together the ActiveBatch jobs. The developers are mainly mainframe developers who don't touch ActiveBatch, or they are application developers who tie everything together into this entire modernization effort. There are a ton of products tied into that effort, ActiveBatch being one. ActiveBatch "brings the others together," such as printing from a third-party vendo, our insurance suite for billing, claims, commissions, etc. A new underwriting tool will also be tied in eventually. So most of the developers are working on those other applications. Direct users of ActiveBatch boil down to me and a couple others who are familiar with Activebatch but who are not as familiar with it as I am.

Currently, any issues with the batch processes are more the result of a learning curve for us.

I would rate the solution at eight out of 10. I'm a stickler with ratings. Nine would be the highest I would ever give anything because nothing is perfect. Here, it comes down to the fact that the navigation can be clunky at times, but I think that's more on you to learn. One thing ActiveBatch could do is provide more examples of real-life business use and business case examples, that show how others have structured their systems. That would probably be a big help. They do tell you how to organize jobs within Plans and you can nest things that way, but more real-life examples would probably have helped me to see how other businesses are using it or how their folder or their object structures are set up.

I love the product. It's exactly what we were looking for.

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.

We send out requests to leaders for the inputs, and the inputs are either shared via emails or uploaded on SharePoint. Then, we download that data process them, and convert them to consumable format in Excel, the excel files then get uploaded onto SQL servers which are connected to visualization tools, post refresh we publish the reports onto services.

The entire process of scheduling, running DB jobs, applying security, refreshing DB, publish was done manually and repeated whenever new inputs come in, now ActiveBatch has streamlined the entire flow with a minimal error rate.

My team consists of five associates. We mainly deal with pricing, sales operations, reporting, forecasting, and several other analytics.

The use of ActiveBatch has made all our lives easy by automating a lot of manual repetitive tasks that we do on a daily basis. We save hours and effort aand gain a high accuracy rate.

Approximately ~20 hours of manual effort have been reduced to ~5 hours with the help of ActiveBatch.

It has enabled us to work on multiple platforms at the same with its capability to integrate with other applications and web services.

The most valuable feature is the drag-and-drop functionality, which makes it a very easy-to-use software for anyone who is working on the software for the very first time. There is minimal coding knowledge required.

I like the ability to integrate with other applications, software, and cloud services which empowers anyone using the software to work on various platforms at any given time.

The job scheduling feature increases the efficiency of the software as it requires minimal manual intervention.

ActiveBatch is a powerful and robust workload automation tool that is the best in the market. I do not see major setbacks in the software. However, there are a few things that need to be improved to make it more efficient and provide a better user experience, such as: 

• reducing the lag
• having more security privileges
• pricing that is more affordable.

However, these minor improvement areas would not impact the efficiency or accuracy of the software. ActiveBatch still remains on top of all the workload automation software out in the market.

I've used the solution for one year.

I do not foresee any challenges with the software scalability, bigger organizations can easily deploy however pricing might be the primary concern for smaller organizations.

I do not have a case to bring out as I have not faced an issue and have never needed to reach out to support.

Positive

There was no transition from similar software.

The initial setup is a little complex; providing a well-documented user guide would resolve the issue.

We handled the setup in-house.

In terms of ROI, the solution has saved manual hours (from ~20 hours to ~5 hours in a month) and increased accuracy by ~17%.

The initial setup is a little complex. Subscriptions can be made for a group at a reasonable price.

I did also evaluate Jira.

The software is definitely the best. With minor fixes, it could be great and remain very competitive.

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.

We use ActiveBatch to run the data warehouse production batch schedule, which is 24/7. We run, on average, about 200 distinct workflows each day to update the warehouse. And once the warehouse tables are loaded, we trigger our business intelligence reports and our analytics reports. We also use ActiveBatch to run a software tool called iCEDQ for data quality, as well as some Alteryx jobs.

Our production servers are in a co-location, and the solution is deployed onsite there.

Before we had ActiveBatch, we used the Informatica Workflow Scheduler, and we would have to start a downstream workflow, but have it wait for the completion of the first one by a trigger file. So "Workflow B" would be waiting for a control file that said "Workflow A" is done. If we had to do reruns — sometimes we would create a control file by mistake and that would throw off the next day's run — and we'd have to do manual reruns. With ActiveBatch, it's very easy to say, "Workflow A is done, run B," and onward: "Run C, Run D," as soon as they're done. You don't need to worry about whether a control file was created, or how long is the job going to wait for. It gives you much simpler and easy-to-understand control of the flow of jobs, as they run.

Using ActiveBatch hasn't really reduced our code base because we would be developing these workflows in Informatica if we weren't using ActiveBatch. But the scheduling and integration into the batch schedule for something new are much simpler and save us a little bit of time, now that we have everything developed, for the most part. We may go a month without adding anything to our schedule and we may go four or five months without adding anything to the schedule, but it gives us an easier understanding of the flow of the data and helps us make sure dependencies are met in a more straightforward fashion than through the Informatica scheduler.

ActiveBatch hasn't really improved our job success rate percentage. If a job fails, we still get our failure messages from Informatica, and in some cases from ActiveBatch. The biggest benefit is that the biggest issue we were having was the timing of all of the downstream applications from the warehouse, and it has greatly improved that.

And it has saved man-hours, although it has not reduced headcount. It has saved man-hours in that situation when we would have issues and our old scheduling solution would break down because of them. This allows us to not have to worry about how to start the downstream applications, based on the warehouse. I would estimate it saves us about 20 hours per month.

One of the valuable features is the ability to trigger workflows, one after another, based on success, without having to worry about overlapping workflows. 

The ability to integrate our BI, analytics, and our data quality jobs is also valuable. We used to have everything set up just based on time: Run the data warehouse until five in the morning, run BI at 5:30 in the morning. There were times that we missed the deadline so that when the BI jobs would run, the data would be incomplete, or we had a big gap in time where we were missing out on starting early. It has really saved us a lot of man-hours compared to when we would have a data issue and we would have to manually restart all of the downstream jobs, after the warehouse.

ActiveBatch also provides us with a single pane of glass for end-to-end visibility of workflows. That simplifies the process when we check to see if things have run or how they're running. The Map View feature makes it easy to see what the dependencies are. It's helpful to have a visual, top-down look, from start to finish, at what flows are running when you need to look into that.

In terms of the unlimited bandwidth, as far as I can tell it's handled all of our volume without any issues whatsoever. For the analytics stuff and the business intelligence stuff, I don't keep track of how many jobs they have running each day. I can only really check the warehouse, but as far as I can tell it has handled the total volume of our needs without any issue whatsoever.

We use event triggers and file events, and one job we have uses email triggers. Especially for the business side, if they have a list of call center people or a list of promotions or some costing information that they need loaded into the warehouse, it allows us to say to them, "We don't need a dummy file and we don't need a blank file. Whenever you have a file ready to go, just put it on a shared drive and the job will automatically pick it up." So it simplifies our interactions with the business and allows them more flexibility to get their work done. The triggering doesn't so much reduce delays but it alleviates the need either to have the business create a dummy file or to code the job in such a way that if it doesn't find a file to run each day, it won't error-out or have to send an informational message. If we get a file a day, or if we get five files in a day, or if we only get one file every six months, the job just runs when the business has the data available, without our having to worry about it.

We also use an Oracle trigger, although we've had inconsistent performance with the Oracle trigger. It had to do with the timing of the Oracle logs. The Oracle trigger function wouldn't work because Oracle had a lock on the archive log file. We have had a couple of cases where we had to remove that Oracle trigger function from our schedule. But we still use it for some cases.

The thing I've noticed the most is the Help function. It's very difficult, at times, to find examples of how to do something. The Help function will explain what the tool does, but we're not a Windows shop at the data warehouse. Our data warehouse jobs actually run on Linux servers. Finding things for Linux-based solutions is not as easy as it is for Windows-based solutions. I would like to see more examples, and more non-Windows examples as well, in the Help.

I have been using ActiveBatch for almost five years.   

Stability has been excellent. In the four or five years I can't even think of a time when the scheduler went down. We use two agents for production, and a scheduler and two agents for tests, and I can think of maybe three times that we had to reboot one of the agents. But I can't think of a time when the scheduler actually went down.

It seems very scalable. We use a very small portion of the functionality and the available types of jobs. Of the job steps in the library, we only use about 2 or 3 percent of them. We bought it for a specific purpose and it served our purpose quite well.

We have used the technical support. On a scale of one to 10, I'd give the Knowledge Base a six or seven. I would give the actual support folks an eight-and-a-half or nine.

It just depends on who you get to respond to your question or to your issue. We've had folks that have been excellent and have pinpointed the problem right away and given us a clear solution to our problems. And there have been times when we have gotten someone who doesn't quite understand the product and it feels like we're providing them more answers than they're providing us. That's been rare but I can think of at least one case where we had to say, "Can you put somebody else on or ask for some help on our question?" And they eventually did, but it was kind of frustrating. But for the most part, it's been fine.

Ninety-five percent of the warehouse jobs that we run that were Informatica jobs have been replaced with ActiveBatch. We have a couple of jobs with some specialized logic that we haven't taken the time to figure out how to do in ActiveBatch yet. Of the 200 workflows, we run a day, 190 of them or so run through ActiveBatch.

We have seen ROI with the solution. It has simplified the warehouse job flow, our analytics workflow, as well as our business intelligence and data quality workflows. I don't know the exact cost per year of the solution, but it has simplified and made things much easier to understand in terms of dependencies among our data flows.

The breakthrough for us was when we were able to take completely different software tools and integrate them into one long flow of data. We have our Informatica jobs which then trigger some PLC to SQL jobs in ActiveBatch, but they also trigger Alteryx jobs, which is its own software tool. It can integrate and execute iCEDQ, which is its own software, as well as Tableau. The ability to trigger those jobs from completely different software tools, in one flow, has saved us a lot of time and a lot of headaches.

Don't be afraid to dig in and try things. I said one of the weaknesses is the Help, but the Help function has helped me figure a few things out. We have jobs that update the pager email to go from an offsite pager to an onsite pager and back again. So don't be afraid to take the time to try to figure something different out. There are some useful things in the Help.

I'm the primary person using ActiveBatch in the warehouse. A month ago, we had a lot more people using it, but in the travel industry we've already had some severe layoffs. There were 10 people using ActiveBatch. They were all data analysts or data quality analysts, and I am the data warehouse developer. There were also business intelligence developers.

The primary use case of using ActiveBatch Workload Automation Software is that it enables IT teams to define, schedule, and execute a wide range of batch jobs and workflows, including file transfers, database changes, and application integrations (and much more), all from a single central platform. 

The software can automate mission-critical business processes with ease. My work environment has a large number of applications that must be handled simultaneously. In this scenario, the software really helps to monitor all the processes, which reduces manual intervention and human error while increasing productivity.

My organization's IT operations have been made more efficient by Active Batch, which automates time-consuming, repetitive procedures. The active batch may assist in making sure that crucial activities are carried out in the proper sequence and at the appropriate time with the use of features like job dependencies, event triggers, and notifications. 

Additionally, the software offers real-time monitoring and reporting features that let IT teams keep tabs on the progress of their batch operations and workflows. 

Overall, the software helps organizations improve the reliability and performance of their IT systems.

The Active Batch Workload Automation Software has a feature that I truly appreciate: it automatically distributes workloads over various servers and resources, improving performance and ensuring that the necessary resources are used for the right jobs. 

The software also supports a wide variety of platforms and applications, including Windows, Linux, Unix, and many more popular enterprise applications, making it a flexible and versatile solution for automating critical business workflows. I highly recommend the software.

While ActiveBatch is a robust and comprehensive workload automation software, I feel that it will be of great help if it is improved in the following areas:

As more organizations are moving towards a cloud-based infrastructure, ActiveBatch could incorporate more capabilities that support popular cloud platforms, such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. 

Active Batch could also offer deeper integration with DevOps tools to enable more streamlined and automated software development processes. 

Apart from these enhancements, everything about the software is highly appreciated.

I have been using this solution for the past six to 12 months.

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.

As sales operations analysts, our main task is to deal with cumbersome data, forecasting, and sharing these cleaned data with our global partners.

We clean these data and store it in consumable Excel files and then upload these to SQL servers which are in turn connected to visualization tools and we often refresh these tools to publish our dashboards in service.

ActiveBatch has streamlined all these steps with automation and no manual intervention which has helped to decrease errors.

ActiveBatch Workload Automation is a super robust application FOR Regular SQL tasks or other file maintenance which in turn can help us to free up the time that we spend on working on repetitive tasks. Approximately ~25 hours of manual effort has been reduced to ~5 hours.

It also offers a centralized platform for managing activities across many environments, applications, etc.

ActiveBatch has made our lives very easy by automating a lot of features which has led to fewer errors and more accuracy.

The product:

1. Is very easy to use, has a good user interface, and not many prerequisites are needed.
   
2. Offers a centralized platform for managing activities across many environments, applications, etc.
3. Offers good automation where manual intervention is significantly reduced - which has led to fewer manual errors.
4. Does frequent job runs and the load on the server has reduced.

There are a few improvements needed:

1. ActiveBatch Workload Automation is a super robust application for regular SQL tasks or other file maintenance - although it needs a few tweaks.
   
2. ActiveBatch's user interface needs an update as some features are hidden and repetitive clicks are needed to access those.
3. ActiveBatch scalability can be increased to help working on larger workloads.
4. ActiveBatch event-based triggers are not reliable at times.
5. ActiveBatch UI could use a little more help, and video tutorials would be greatly appreciated for user guides.

I've used the solution for one year.

The stability is good.

I'd rate the scalability nine out of ten.

Customer support response was a bit slow when we needed a technical escalation.

Positive

The initial setup was a bit tedious due to a lack of proper user guides.

We implemented the solution via our in-house team.

ActiveBatch has saved a significant amount of manual time (from ~25 hours down to ~5 hours), hence bang for the buck.

Setting up the solution was quite hard initially. The pricing is pretty agreeable for all our requirements. The licensing is easy as we had the choice according to our requirements.

I did not evaluate other options as Active Batch was the top choice and we opted for this without any second thoughts.

ActiveBatch is a robust automation software and it is our go-to option.