ActiveBatch by Redwood Reviews

We have connected this automation tool to our SAP ECC system. All the ECC batch jobs are scheduled via this tool.

We had configured the alerting mechanism so that whenever we have any job fails/long-running jobs, we get an immediate email notification which helps in monitoring the jobs.

The best part of the tool is the submit frame and time window where we can schedule jobs as per the customer's requirements.

As this has a quality environment, we connected this tool to ECC QA, and before making any changes to production, we are able to test the new requirements in quality then we can move to production. 

It helped to schedule and monitor the SAP ECC batch jobs.

It reduced the workload.

It can connect to a number of third-party/legacy systems. Once the job is scheduled, no manual interruption is required. Therefore, once the job is scheduled, there won't be any interruption to the job.

As we support the different countries in the project, we need to schedule jobs in different time zone; this tool helped to schedule the jobs as per the respective time zone because this tool contains almost all the time zones. We can schedule jobs as per the regional/country time.

The best feature is the alerting mechanism.

We had configured email alerts for many scenarios so that whenever a job fails/is long-running, we get an immediate email notification. There is no need to log in to the system every time and do the monitoring based on the email alert. We can inform the respective team and take action immediately. It helps to avoid business impact.

We get the best customer support; whenever we are doing any testing/facing any issues/during any new requirement, we can raise a ticket to the support team, or we can schedule a call with them so that we get an immediate response and solutions.

The monitoring dashboard could have been more user-friendly so that in the monitoring dashboard itself, we can see the total number of jobs created in the system and how many were currently active/scheduled/chained.

The reports could have more pre-defined options, such as killed/failed jobs from the current month. That way, we can get the reports quickly and help the audit process.  

Whenever any job fails in the system, it should be listed based on the priority of the job incident and should generate and assign it to the respective job owners.

I've used the solution for one to two years.

We did not use a different solution. 

The solution is easy to set up.

It offers very good value for money.

The license renewal activity is easy; the support team will provide the query we need to run it.

Primarily, we've been using it in a localized way, but it's becoming more and more of an enterprise tool as the knowledge is shared throughout the team and department. But primarily it has been used for ETL-type work. My team is data integration and we use it to schedule our Informatica PowerCenter workflows as well as DataStage. We also use it for a lot of file transfers, such as SFTP stuff. And we've recently explored some API calls that we can use to interface with Qlik.

It's really helpful with scheduling and setting up dependencies. I primarily use it with our data warehouse and there are a lot of dependencies. First you have to load XYZ tables before it's filtered and presented in the reporting layer. It really helps to maintain those constraints and dependencies.

We use it to schedule our data warehouse. We use the Informatica PowerCenter tool and we have Oracle's out-of-the-box Data Warehouse so there are a lot of workflows that need to run, either sequentially or that are dependent on one another. ActiveBatch really handles hundreds of workflows on a schedule and it definitely maintains those constraints. I've never seen a failure to trigger a job at an appropriate time. We definitely rely on it heavily in that regard.

ActiveBatch was originally purchased as a scheduler, to enable us to execute DataStage jobs, but once we started to grow, and our use cases started to vary, we realized that we could use the pre-built SFTP capabilities. Previously, we had to code things in our DataStage tool where it wasn't as intuitive. You really had to get into the programming. But a business user can certainly use ActiveBatch to set up an SFTP connection, as long as they have the information. It's pretty easy to do that. Moving SFTP files around is certainly valuable to the business because I work for a hospital. The health system is definitely reliant on the data that we move around, and ActiveBatch really executes the ETL workflows that actually transform and move the data. We rely on it to appropriately schedule and execute those workflows to get the data to the right place.

The solution has become our center of excellence for all things related to automation in our organization. We started with DataStage and then we acquired the Informatica tool and we use ActiveBatch for that. Now we're seeing we can use the scheduling capabilities of ActiveBatch to call our Qlik refresh applications. We're starting to expand ActiveBatch as an enterprise solution and other departments are also finding that they can do all the remote scripting that they used to have to do manually, or that operations would have to do, in ActiveBatch and it will take care of that on a schedule, instead of wasting man-hours.

It also provides proactive error detection, even in real time. Almost all of our workflows have a lot of notifications set up to either email, or page, or create a ServiceNow ticket if there is a failure. We're notified immediately if something's not working as it should. That has prevented problems from becoming fires. If we didn't get those notifications, if our data warehouse was not operating as we expected it to, that certainly would cause some problems. 

In addition, in terms of workflow completion times, I don't know what we would have done without it, as far as scheduling goes. It would probably be a lot more complicated to schedule a lot of our workflows through these other products that are more focused on the data manipulation and are not as concerned with scheduling. So to be able to schedule and set up dependencies has been pretty valuable for us. It has improved our workflow completion rates by five hours per day, because we execute our workflows daily. It has also reduced our man-hours by something like 60 percent. It has a lot of intuitive stuff so that instead of building out code for it, we can just plug-and-play with it. You put in the right parameters and it takes care of it for you.

We have definitely been able to re-assign staff to more value-added activities as a result of using ActiveBatch. Something that has been very valuable for us is that we have been able to build our solutions in a way that, if they fail, ActiveBatch actually tries to restart them itself, without any manual intervention. If that fails it goes to our operations team. Before, that was something that our ETL or data integration team had to handle ourselves. Being able to push those issues to ActiveBach and to the other team, it has really saved us a lot of time.

We do a lot of very specific scheduling. You could do it as simply as, "Hey, run this every day at six o'clock," or you could do something like an exact date and exclude bank holidays. It has a very robust scheduling aspect.

We use a lot of SFTP stuff. With version 11 and version 12 they came out with a managed file transfer. They have a lot of pre-programmed "job steps" so that you don't have to develop custom code. You can just say, "Copy file. SFTP file." They build up a lot of the common uses that you would be looking to develop yourself.

We leverage the solution's native integrations regularly. We have to get files from a remote server outside the organization, and even send things outside the organization. We use a lot of its file manipulation and SFTP functionality for contacting remote servers. 

ActiveBatch also has a lot of pre-built looping structures, reading files, looping-if-branch; basic programming concepts are pre-built for you and robust. That's definitely nice.

It's very easy to use. I was self-taught before any training was available for our company. It's very easy to learn to use yourself. I have a technical background but even some of our business users, with some light training, would be able to navigate and use the tool very easily. Things like the copy files or move files are very intuitive.

It's extremely flexible. In addition to that pre-built functionality and the ability to create API calls, it allows us to create our own service library. That wasn't default but they said "Hey, we have this package where you can build your own library." It also has some different scripting of job steps. If I want to use PowerShell to achieve something that might not be out-of-the-box, I've been able to leverage that utility to achieve whatever we're looking to do. If there's a problem that needs a solution that may not be available in our ETL products, my first go-to is ActiveBatch to do some scripting.

Between version 10 and version 12 there was a change. In version 10, they had each object in its own folder. But on the back end, they saw it at the root level. So when we moved over to version 12, everything was in the same area mixed together. It was incredibly difficult and we actually had to create our own folders and move those objects—like schedules, jobs, user accounts—and manually put those into folders, whereas the previous version already had it. They did allow us to filter so that we could see things, but that was not nearly as effective as what we had become used to having.

I've been using ActiveBatch Workload Automation for three years.

It's very stable. Any of the issues that we tend to see are related to the product that ActiveBatch is trying to talk to. For example, we use the web service for our Informatica tool, and issues we see are on the PowerCenter side, not the ActiveBatch side.

I know it has features for scaling, so as we continue to build it out as an enterprise tool we're able to use what they call a Virtual Root. The team using it doesn't see everybody else's work, they only see what's relevant to them. That's really neat. 

We went from one team using it to some four or five teams using it now. The other teams are just starting, but I don't see any collisions. It's easy to grow.

We have about 30 users of the solution, including developers, solution architects, operations, trainers, administrators, and data modelers.

Their support is good. For every support question I've raised they've had very responsive teams. To date, we haven't submitted an issue that they haven't been able to correct or provide some sort of solution for.

Before ActiveBatch, as they created jobs, they used our DataStage tool as the scheduler. That functionality was within the product.

I was involved in the deployment of the current version. We originally had version 10, but within the last year we upgraded to version 12 and I played a role in that. From my perspective as a user of the application, it was very seamless, especially moving our existing workflows. We needed to keep them running on the new version and the backward compatibility was spot-on.

That upgrade process took about three months but that was not a dedicated, focused effort. There were a lot of other variables.

I would recommend taking the time to understand the different objects and features so that, as you grow as an enterprise, the architecture is already in place and you're not figuring it out as you go, like we did.

The ability to automate predictable, repeatable processes is something that we haven't leveraged as much. It's the Heuristic Queue Allocation where it can schedule and manage execution of workflows with whatever resource is available. With that said, I do notice that it does track, by default, the average run time and how long jobs run. There are some default analytics that it provides.

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.

Positive

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.

Most of the jobs are for the automation of processes, but we also use it for IT operations, including monitoring. We execute over 20,000 jobs daily.

It's moving data files and doing a lot of calculations in hydrology and the like. The business users are maintaining their own jobs, setting them up, configuring, and maintaining them. They only contact us, in IT,  if there are any problems. 

ActiveBatch is completely on-prem but the rest of our organization has many different kinds of infrastructure and locations, both in the cloud and in 16 countries. We have about 4,000 employees.

The automation has saved us many hours although I can't say exactly how many.

We're able to create workflows without coding.

I would imagine it has also resulted in an improvement in workflow completion times as well.

Our IT organization is using it for monitoring. We get information by running checks using ActiveBatch to obtain information to provide to the monitoring systems. It helps us keep systems up and to receive early warning about problems.

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.

It's quite customizable because it supports many different platforms and technologies, and it covers almost everything we need to set up different jobs in our environment. We are using it mostly for our Windows and Unix servers and we are using different triggers, for example, Apache ActiveMQ. It is used by many different applications and systems. We use various databases, including Oracle, SQL Server, Microsoft, as well as Active Directory.

We are at the beginning of implementing agents in our Azure cloud. We haven't used that part very much yet but it will be used. We are moving more and more systems from on-prem to the cloud, so it will increase gradually.

It could be easier to provide dashboards on how many jobs are running at the same time; more monitoring.

We've been using ActiveBatch for at least 10 years. We're on version 11 but we are planning to upgrade to version 12 in a couple of months. 

I'm not an end-user, I'm just responsible for making sure it's working. I troubleshoot if something is wrong and I do upgrading and installing.

It's pretty reliable. If it's organized and configured in an optimal way it works pretty well, but it requires a lot of planning. For example, you have to make sure that end-users don't have too many privileges because they can mess things up. It's very important to plan carefully before implementing.

We have had some issues in one of our installations in Germany, but they are still on version 10, which is quite an old implementation. They will replace that with the new version 12 in the near future.

The scalability is quite good. You can add more agents. We haven't had any performance problems or issues with it.

The number of jobs and the number of applications that take advantage of ActiveBatch are growing constantly within our company. 

Other than scheduling in Windows, I don't think our company had a previous solution.

ActiveBatch was already implemented when I came to this company, but I have been here for a couple of upgrades.

Some parts of the setup are straightforward and some parts are more complex. The main features are pretty straightforward to set up but when it comes to the features that require an internet information server, it's a bit more tricky to set the secure connections and certificates, etc. We struggled a bit with that but we had good support from the vendor. They were able to make it work.

The implementation itself doesn't take a long time, but it takes a lot of planning: Security, execution agents, and the like. 

There are two of us who work with ActiveBatch maintenance, but it's not a full-time responsibility. We have between 100 and 200 people who transact with it. Some of them have read-only access so that they can view the jobs.

I also have experience with CA Workload Automation. It has been some years since I worked with it but it's the same concept and the same features but doing things in slightly different ways. 

Start with a simple, small version and try some simple tasks to see how effective it is.

Using  ActiveBatch I have learned that the potential for reducing costs using an automation tool is huge, and that when the business becomes aware of it they really embrace the product.

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.

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.

As a QA engineer, monitoring logs in the production environment was one tedious task. This was time-consuming and required lots of manual effort. However, using ActiveBatch Workload minimized the downtime and maximized productivity.

Job scheduling is another major advantage of this tool. At the time, there were nightly batch jobs like Trigger Service, User Service, Notifications Service, and many more, which were easily handled by ActiveBatch Workload and made our job simple and effortless. We currently have 25 jobs running on this platform with different environments.

There were more than 20 bots developed for the closure of tickets, and every bot has to be run on different environments. Using ActiveBatch has improved our job scheduling and reduced the manual effort of closing similar kinds of tickets. This way, operation costs are significantly reduced. Anyone can now run the bots and complete the automation work with zero knowledge.

We work with different time zones. This tool helped to schedule the jobs irrespective of a timeframe as this tool supports all time zones, and the jobs are scheduled accordingly.

We used to monitor the dashboard every hour to report in which task the orders failed, and huge task failures were to be immediately reported. 

Using this tool, if there are any huge failures, we immediately get an email notification, and the proper team will be informed, at which time they can act accordingly. It helped us to stop having to monitor the dashboard each and every hour. This helped us to avoid huge impacts on our business.

We also have integrated three different applications and are able to fetch information without any issues.

Setting up the software was hard. This could still be made easier. At times, the email alerts won’t work properly. There should be proper documentation for the email workflow.

The new version looks good, however, it has lots of lag and often crashes - unlike the older versions. 

Exporting the documents in .jpg format was a bit difficult.

Customer Service could be better.

It's been one year since I’ve been using ActiveBatch Workload Automation. It made my job easy by providing automation for job scheduling and monitoring.

As of now, the product looks stable, and it works well in all environments. This is a go-to product for all organizations.

Organizations with more than 1000-1500 employees can scale easily.

Customer service could be better as I have faced some issues at times.

Positive

I have used Selenium previously. However, job scheduling, monitoring dashboard, and email alert features were not there. This is the major reason why I switched to ActiveBatch.

The initial setup was complex as we wanted to set it up on different environments like Windows and Linux.

This was implemented through an in-house deployment, and I would rate the process eight out of ten. The level of expertise was high.

I have not been in touch with the financial team who would monitor ROI. This is unknown to me.

The pricing was high for organizational purposes, and the set-up cost was okay. 

I have used Selenium, and there were many drawbacks, so I switched to this application as it made my work easy and simple. 

I have no concerns about the application, as it has worked very well for me and my team. I recommend the solution to others. They could take advantage of this application by reducing their manual work.