ActiveBatch by Redwood Reviews

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Except for the GUI, everything looks good.

I have been using this product for around nine months.

The solution is very stable and dependable.

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

Technical support offers great service.

Positive

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

The initial setup was not much of an issue.

We did the implementation via an in-house team.

This solution is really worth the money.

It is worth the money; go for it.

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

Mainly we have used ActiveBatch for automating the deployment of different environments like production staging and QA. Earlier, we used it to have different software for each environment. This used to consume a lot of time, however, after using ActiveBatch we can manage everything under a single piece of software. The monitoring and alerting features are a great help to get complete insights and hassle-free for work. 

With the help of ActiveBatch, we have come up with cool automation starting from file transfer and pipelining the scripts with more test cases, had helped our company to grow many folds with the same resources.

Earlier, we had around four to five different tools to manage our automation which was all replaced by ActiveBatch. It is great. Even the resources required to manage those tools were reduced to a great extent and now, with only two employees, we are managing end-to-end automation. 

Our team is mainly into the automation of the entire application which usually takes around 20 minutes to complete. When ActiveBatch was used, it was done in less than five minutes. We were able to complete it before the deadlines we had and even our clients are happy with the results we produced.

Almost all the features are great. That said, if we wanted to select the best, then the monitoring feature which gives complete insights in a single dashboard is the most helpful. It helps to detect immediately if something goes wrong instead of waiting for someone to report it. 

The ROI of the application is more than what we used to spend for the entire year and its reasonable pricing has helped us to use it to its maximum. 

We are able to integrate it into multiple third-party tools like email, backup, tracking systems, SharePoint, Slack alerts, etc.

The help center and documentation are not that helpful. If we had some more user-friendly explanations and more video tutorials about how to set up and debug items, that would be ideal. 

The preset job step types make designing easy, while the steps of the job that allow scripts and code to be run allow for a wide range of additional functionality. This can be made better with more example scripts and pre-coded samples. 

If a few AI tools can be integrated with the product, it would enhance the entire product setup time and debugging issues.

I have used the solution in a previous company for more than a year. In my current company, I've been working with it for the past six months.

The product is very mature. There are a few bugs however, none of them are roadblocks. It can be resolved by some workaround.

There are no scalability issues. It easily can be used in a company with more than 1,000 employees.

They have very good customer service. We had an issue while setting up and we connected with their support team. They were able to help us and fix it on the same day. Their response time has been great.

Positive

I previously used Selenium, however, it's all bits and pieces, so we had to switch to ActiveBatch automation.

It was straightforward to set up. Only in the end, when we were importing files, did we feel a little more documentation would have been required.

We had an in-house team for the implementation. I would rate them eight out of ten.

It has helped to achieve a 20% to 30% net revenue increase in the last quarter.

Setup is easy and can be done within one or two days. The pricing is reasonable when compared to competitors. There is no need to worry about licensing as it's taken care of when you choose the plan.

Since I have worked with ActiveBatch in my previous organization, it was my go-to option. I did not evaluate others. 

Overall, it's the best product that fits perfectly to most of our use cases. That said, it can be made a little more budget-friendly.

The task scheduling was manual earlier, and it was a very difficult and time-consuming task to schedule jobs. Even after this process, it was difficult to find out what was wrong if the job/task has been failed. With the help of ActiveBatch Workload Automation, the entire workflow automation has been automated, and we can schedule our entire process from a single point of contact with features like real-time monitoring. We're streamlining IT operations, getting centralized security, and having quick and reliable integration features that are game changers in the industry.

Active Batch has helped us in a lot of ways. For example, earlier, the process was very time-consuming, and we needed to always have some resources to monitor everything. We needed a resource to schedule, and the entire workflow was not easy. With ActiveBatch, we schedule the tasks automatically and monitor them efficiently to track the tasks in real-time. Mainly, we have streamlined our entire IT operations. Now, we don't always need a resource to schedule or manage things. It does its tasks on its own, and even we can track and audit them efficiently and effectively.

There are many features I found very useful. It was the automatic scheduling of jobs and monitoring in real-time that were very useful. It has streamlined the entire IT operations. A lot of organizations are getting help from this. For developers, it is easy to orchestrate the workflows and the integration has been very easy. We can easily integrate ActiveBatch workload with any tool without any headache. We can optimize existing scripts also. Auditing is made simpler for administrators now.

Whenever there is an overload, we are seeing crashes happening. It is something that has to be taken care of. 

Triggers play a predominant role in doing an automated task after an event. It was eventually used to erase the boilerplate code, however, unfortunately, the triggers are not very reliable in ActiveBatch. It is not performing what it had to do at certain times. 

The application is a bit complicated and it is not very user-friendly for beginners. That might be a disadvantage until they get familiar with it.

I've used the solution for six to 12 months.

We did not previously use a different solution. 

ActiveBatch is the best in terms of reliability and helps with cost-cutting. The licensing was a complete green flag for the product from my side.

We did not evaluate other options.

I am the administrator handling all of the ActiveBatch-related activities. It is used for all of our processes, scheduling, and basically all of the automation.

The schedule is good because you don't miss any issues. Let's say you reboot the server and there are still things pending, they will resume. From a scheduling point of view, it is pretty good.

The reporting needs to be made easier, such as by including a dashboard. As it is now, I have to go to each and every folder in order to see the reports. If I had a higher-level view, such as Tableau-based reporting, then it would be very useful. Right now, it is built-in with the existing GUI and it is very limited. If they were to detach that and provide the data with a template report then that would be the best way to go.

The interface is not that user-friendly and is a little tough to navigate.

In the future, I would like to see support for mobile alerts so that we don't have to log in to find out whether there is a problem.

I would also like to see more support for cloud-based environments. For example, we might want our workflow to include Snowflake from Amazon. So far, all of our work is on our on-premises servers, whether it is moving a file or running a database. We are now extending out and would like to use ActiveBatch to bring in more controls. Examples include using Snowflake or Redshift in my workflow. That would be very helpful.

I have been using ActiveBatch for approximately 13 years, since 2007.

Overall, it is quite stable. Over the years, we have had very few issues with stability.

Our company is small, with perhaps seven or eight people using ActiveBatch. We have hundreds of jobs running and we haven't had any problems. The scheduler continues to do its job.

The technical support is pretty good.

The initial setup was very straightforward and never gave me a problem.

The setup and maintenance are done in-house. We have overnight support group from India and they manage the nightly processes using ActiveBatch.

We are currently paying a yearly fee, although they are greatly increasing their prices and changing to a subscription-based model. Currently, we are paying approximately $7,000 yearly, which includes support.

Before choosing ActiveBatch, we looked at a couple of products and run a pilot with Control-M. 

We look at different products and this is definitely a very good one. I do not have much familiarity with the cloud-based solutions but on a Windows platform, this one is pretty good.

Overall, this is a good product but there are a lot of improvements that can be made to the interface to make it more user-friendly. Also, if I were rating the reporting then I would only score it a six and a half. Finally, we do need a solution that can reach out to cloud environments.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use ActiveBatch Workload Automation primarily for managing work schedules.

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

I found ActiveBatch Workload Automation to be a very good scheduling tool. What I like best about it is that it has very less downtime when managing many complex scheduling workflows, so I'm very impressed with ActiveBatch Workload Automation.

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

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

I've been using ActiveBatch Workload Automation since 2009.

ActiveBatch Workload Automation has very good stability.

ActiveBatch Workload Automation is a scalable solution.

The technical support for ActiveBatch Workload Automation is very good.

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

The initial setup for ActiveBatch Workload Automation was straightforward.

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

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

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

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

I'm using version 12 of ActiveBatch Workload Automation.

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

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

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

ActiveBatch Workload Automation is a standard scheduling tool that you have on the market. The ultimate goal is to run everything powered through ActiveBatch Workload Automation, but we are always constantly trying to move from our legacy processes, which always takes a lot of time and effort. However, all of the new processes we are focused on implementing through ActiveBatch Workload Automation.

One of the most valuable features of this solution is the versatility of the prebuilt jobs.

Any product is going to have some room for improvement, no matter what. I see the company has already ventured into AWS and they're constantly trying to improve the managed file transfer which they have recently improvised. I think they bought a software called JSCAPE and they're trying to improve it, which is good. 

I am not sure if JSCAPE would be part of the base product but currently, you have to buy a separate license for it, which doesn't make sense. If it was Microsoft, ServiceNow, or integrating with other software vendors, I would understand but JSCAPE is now in-house and I'm not sure if they can justify having a separate license for JSCAPE. I would probably expect them to be packaging JSCAPE into the base product. They did switch over from a perpetual license model to a subscription model, which hurt the company a little bit. Nobody is offering the perpetual model anymore. As long as the transition is fair for both the companies, I think it should be fine and not burn us out.

I have been using ActiveBatch Workload Automation for a few years.

ActiveBatch Workload Automation is scalable.

The scalability of the solution is good.

The technical support was difficult if you wanted to escalate the issue, it takes a little bit longer to escalate. Their service model does not allow for everybody to be on the hotline all the time. I understand that, but unfortunately, with a production system, that's what it is. If there is a bug, you want that hotline as soon as possible, because we don't know the impact of it. If it can widespread, if there is an issue, or if it's contained within one or two jobs. Luckily this has not been the case. 

It's all same architecture and framework of which you built upon several things. If there's a problem with it, you want to know it way before it impacts the other jobs.

I like ActiveBatch Workload Automation's licensing model because they're not holding you down on an agentless model or agent model, where every server needs to have an agent. That's the main selling point of the solution and I hope they stay that way.

I have evaluated other solutions, such as Control-M.

I rate ActiveBatch Workload Automation an eight out of ten.

I rated ActiveBatch Workload Automation high because the licensing model is way better than other solutions, such as Control-M or other companies that charge a lot more. I like their agentless model because most of the scheduling companies put in the rules saying, that for each server you touch, you need an agent. Otherwise, they cannot communicate, and will not work. This is a large advantage for ActiveBatch Workload Automation their Agent model is great.