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.

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.

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.

In our company we deal with a lot of data processing. Clients will send us extract files that we load into our system so that we can run calculations. And all of that is orchestrated using ActiveBatch automation. To summarize, we have software that we use to calculate values, but we need to receive the files from the client, get them to the right spot, and get them ready for processing. All of those steps are done using the automation tool.

The integrations we mainly use it with are FTP and SQL and we use a batch file or a script file to call our internal programs. It does have the ability to call PowerShell scripts and we do use some of those. We just don't have a need to use a lot of PowerShell because most of our software is designed using a different language.

The biggest example of the way it has improved things — and this is actually why we moved to ActiveBatch — is that most of our jobs are our processes that run overnight. That's the critical time for us because we have to load and calculate this data overnight so that the clients can have it in the morning. Our old automation tool would frequently have jobs that just failed, with no reason given. It would not track the history, so there was no way to determine if there was a pattern of failure. And it was difficult to restart jobs. That's what moved us to ActiveBatch: knowing that the job is going to run, and that if it does fail it's going to give adequate information as to why it failed. Typically, any failure in our case is data-related or due to code on our side. Rarely has it ever been an issue with ActiveBatch itself. Having that stability, especially doing our overnight processing, is the biggest benefit to our business from using ActiveBatch.

If you're a programmer, you can certainly write out scripts and design jobs that are similar to programs. But a lot of our technicians who use it do not have a programming background, and it's simply a matter of using the templates that are already provided. You do not have to have any kind of programming background to be able to use the software. 

While we've never had a whole lot of scripting done, even with our old tool, with ActiveBatch it's very easy to have junior employees log into the system. They can learn how to create jobs. It's definitely something that's accessible by more junior level employees, as well as senior level.

It also has the capability for event-driven automation to trigger workflows based on specific emails, file events, FTP file triggers, message queues, date database modifications, tweets, etc. For us, the big one is a file trigger, when a file arrives on our FTP server in a certain location. We'll occasionally use a database trigger as well. And we use the scheduling capability that it has to run a job at a certain date and time. These abilities have definitely increased efficiency and reduced delays. It's mainly from the stability of the automation. Even with the old software, it had that same capability, but it just wasn't as reliable. It would just have odd failures that we never could quite explain, and the vendor could not either. ActiveBatch, having that stability and being able to use those triggers to automatically trigger our jobs and get them running overnight, greatly enhances our efficiency. Having a team manually do those things would take much longer.

I don't know if I could quantify the improvement in job success rate percentage, but when I joined this particular department it was right around the time that the transition was being made from the old automation to ActiveBatch. What I do know is that there were enough failures and instability in the old automation tool to trigger moving to a new tool, which is ActiveBatch. Since then, we have not had those types of issues. It's very reliable and very stable which is exactly what we need. 

I would think there has been improvement in workflow completion times, just from the stability standpoint. The way we create and use jobs in ActiveBatch is similar to what we did before. If everything worked as designed, I imagine that the old tool and ActiveBatch would probably process things in the same timeframe. It's just that ActiveBatch is much more stable. There aren't as many failures. The speed factor, for what we use it for, would probably be similar with any automation tool because we use it for such straightforward, simple tasks. Based on all the other performance indicators, I would imagine it's just as fast, if not faster than other tools.

Because we're a pretty small company, using a tool like this doesn't necessarily reduce headcount, but it allows us to not have to add headcount.

We mostly use the fairly straightforward features of the solution:

• copying and moving files from one location to another
• FTP processes to send and receive files 
• database queries to update certain data elements. 

It's nothing super-complex, but these are things we would not be able to do manually without adding a lot more time to the process.

It's also very easy to restart jobs at a certain point, in the event of a failure. Things like that are things that we didn't want to have with some of our former automation tools: overall ease of use.

In addition, you can go to one screen and see every job that is currently running and what the status of that job is. You can scroll up or down and see jobs that ran in the past jobs and jobs that are scheduled to run in the future. It makes it easier to monitor jobs. A lot of our processes run overnight. We have a team that monitors the automation jobs to make sure everything's running and to correct any failures that may happen. They are able to easily see the status of everything using ActiveBatch, without having to click on multiple jobs to see an individual status. They can get a summary of it on the summary view.

It's pretty customizable, from what I can tell. We haven't had a need to customize a lot of things because most of what we do is pretty straightforward. But you can script out a PowerShell script and use some of the internal functions and features of  ActiveBatch within the script. You could, theoretically, customize it pretty extensively. We just haven't had a need to do that very much.

The only thing is that it does have a little bit of a learning curve because it is fairly complex. You have to learn how it does things. I don't know if it's any worse than any other tool would be, just because of the nature of what it does. Like many things, you learn how to do something initially and then, a year or two later, you might find a better way to do it and you have to adjust how you did it before. So the learning curve is the hardest part. Even then isn't bad, because any tool is going to have that type of learning curve. 

We're migrating to version 12 and I know they've made a lot of improvements that can help with navigating that application. I expect that would improve it.

We started migrating to ActiveBatch around 2012 so we've been using it for about eight years. We are currently on version 10 with plans to upgrade soon to version 12.

We've never run into any bandwidth issues, but we're also a pretty small company. The number of jobs that we run is much smaller than a larger company would run. We've talked with other companies that use ActiveBatch and they have far more jobs running concurrently than we do. They have never expressed any issue with bandwidth either. 

From my experience, it seems like it's very scalable. You can create jobs in a manner that they can be reused for multiple clients, using variables. We've never had any issue with the number of concurrent jobs running.

ActiveBatch is running around 300 jobs for us. As our company grows, we'll use it more and more. It's integral to our processing that we have built our business around. As we get more and more clients, we will be using and creating more and more jobs. Eventually, we'll probably need to add additional resources to help with that. It's as scalable as our company is.

Their support is excellent. If we run into any issue, and we can't find a solution on the forums, we'll create a ticket with them and we'll get a response very quickly, especially compared to some of our other vendors. They've always been able to help out and find a solution or answer to our questions, which is great.

Our previous solution was AutoMate BPA. 

We switched because we needed stability. We also needed something that was easy to use where we could have certain functionality, like restarting jobs from different points and reusing steps for multiple clients. Those were things we just did not have in the old tool. Having that stability and the ability to see if a job failed and having adequate log information to indicate why it failed are the biggest reasons why we moved over.

The technician who researched solutions and found ActiveBatch was the guiding force as far as getting it installed, set up, and configured. So I don't have a lot of experience with that side of it. I've mostly been designing how jobs should work and be built. The setup seemed like it was straightforward from what I could tell. I don't think it was super-difficult.

It took us a good year or two to fully convert all of our jobs to ActiveBatch. But that was because we had a large number of jobs that were in the old tool and we had to be careful about adjusting things that are in a production environment. We spaced it out a while to get everything converted.

Our implementation strategy was mostly looking at which clients had more complex jobs and which clients had simpler jobs, so that we could start with the simpler ones as we were getting our feet wet using the tool. Then it was just scheduling out which clients would be converted when and creating the jobs to mirror what we already had in the other tool. It was nothing too complicated.

We have definitely seen ROI. It's a critical component of how we do things now. It has definitely been worth everything we've paid so far, and more.

From what I recall, the price was fairly in line with other automation tools. I don't think it's exorbitantly expensive, relatively speaking. It's definitely been worth every penny for us. It hasn't been the case that we have thought, "Oh, it's too expensive. We need to find something else." It's worth it for us, by a large margin.

In addition to the licensing fee, I believe there is a cost for how many different agents you need to put on servers. There's some additional licensing that you can get, that we haven't had a need for, where you can add jobs that work with VMware or other third-party tools, to open up that part of it.

One of our other technicians was the lead on finding a new automation tool. Along with ActiveBatch, he found three or four others that he thought might have good potential. I was on a few calls where they were demoing the software, and there wasn't really anything that fit for us as well as ActiveBatch did.

Take the time to get a good feel for how it works. That's the biggest thing. Once you have that, start creating the jobs. I would expect that people will be very satisfied with how well it runs and the flexibility that the tool has.

In terms of execution on hybrid machines or across on-prem and cloud systems, it's not applicable for us at this point. All our stuff is hosted. We're not doing anything in the cloud right now, although that may be something that's in our future. But right now, it's just used for servers that we have in our data center.

We have a team of about six or seven people who use ActiveBatch at least a little bit. But only three of us are the "power users." ActiveBatch is designed to have different roles but all three of us do a little bit of all of them. So we haven't divided it out yet in terms of having an operations person or a design person. My role leans more toward designing jobs. The technician that found ActiveBatch, his role leans more towards the operation and administrative side of getting things installed and working on upgrading the application. The third guy does a little of both.

We're pretty satisfied with everything. Their support is great. It does everything we need it to do. There isn't anything that we're having to find workarounds for.

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.

Our project has nearly 150 jobs that run every day, and they manage anything from SaaS. We run a lot of reports and triggers, Some of these are fairly complex, and others are very simple.

We pull information from SFTP shared Paths and run various file-based jobs. The data is staged and moved to target tables, and then there are a number of materialized views that get populated, and that populating is done with ActiveBatch.

We are on-premises. We manage the servers and schedulers on a combination of Windows and Linux.

We have very strict SLAs that require us to generate reports out of the production data on a daily and weekly basis. We, as a support team, are being monitored for any SLA breaches. ActiveBatch has been very stable and has been only affected by database performance or network issues.

As the interactions between ActiveBatch and other tools are automated in the best way possible, it gives us more time to focus on other things. For any job failures or other issues, the logs generated are very easy to figure out the issue and the Root cause for the same.

ActiveBatch has been providing us with the central automation hub for scheduling, alerting, and monitoring, bringing everything together under a single pane of glass.

The REST API adapters and native integrations for integrating and orchestrating the software stack are very flexible. 

The best features in Activebatch include the API calls. These calls can be used to integrate with almost all the required components to log or action on anything.

The job scheduling feature and the templates available make a developer's life easier. We can configure any job without thinking about the skeletal system. Therefore, ActiveBatch is widely utilized and is well embedded in our company.

There are few features in alerts and monitoring where few enhancements are required in email notification declarations. Other than that, all other features are very good and have no issues.

We have faced a couple of issues where we were supposed to log a defect with ActiveBatch. That said, the Active batch Vendor Support is very responsive and reliable. We had the issues fixed within eight hours, even though they were working in a different time zone.

As this platform is very experienced and supportive, there are no issues to report.

I've used the solution for three years. 

The customer support is very reliable and responsive even though there is a difference in time zones.

Positive

We have been using ActiveBatch since I joined the company. We have had a lot of enhancements here, and everything is progressing very well.

We have implemented the solution with an in-house team.

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.

ActiveBatch helped us to streamline our IT workflows and improve overall efficiency. It is the most essential tool in our Infrastructure now. 

The best part of ActiceBatch is its user-friendly Interface, which feels easy to use even for a user with limited technical experience. 

We can configure and design complex workflows. 

It also offers pre-built templates and wizards which can be used to easily and quickly create automated workflows. 

ActiveBatch also includes the option to implement it in on-premises, cloud, and hybrid deployments.

Managing the workload and monitoring the tasks were very difficult with manual interventions. Now, by using ActiveBatch, the process is automated and it runs tasks on a scheduled basis. We can set tasks for daily, monthly, or weekly runs. 

This powerful and reliable tool can be implemented in small businesses and large enterprises that are looking to automate their IT workloads. 

It is used to trigger tasks at specified frequencies, We have also integrated ActiveBatch with different services and applications.

There any many outstanding features in ActiveBatch. For example, error-handling functionality has decreased the errors and issues triggered, which has improved the accuracy of the results. 

ActiveBatch is a valuable tool in our organization as it has increased efficiency and time consumption. It handles large workloads, and batch jobs and automates transfers effortlessly. 

The alerting feature helps notify and address the status of the jobs running and keeps the operations uninterrupted.

After upgrades we are facing a few issues and errors triggered, so focusing on this would be appreciated. Some of the advanced features in the user interface are a bit confusing even after referring to the documents. 

Improvement in support is much needed; there is a lack of training videos that would help us gain more understanding of the product. 

Sometimes, triggering fails and we have to face a lot of issues, Initially while setting up installation we will be confused. 

Integration with other applications should be improved

I've been using ActiveBatch Workload Automation for approximately two years.

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.