Automic Automation Reviews

The primary use case is to automate jobs which run at night on SAP, Unix jobs, and Windows. It has performed well.

It has improved the way my organization functions, in terms of efficiency, time, and costs.

The night processing helps to have data just-in-time for the morning. It is also very important to have the possibility to create incidents or emails if there is a problem, so operations can investigate and do something.

At the moment, we are only using the workload automation and the job scheduling. I think there are more possibilities to automate and connect them to the whole business process.

The most valuable feature is it always runs things automatically that you normally have to do manually, like download files. We also use the FTP agent, where you have to download and upload files at a specific date.

The only thing that we would like improved is the FTP agent. It only supports SOCKS proxy, and we would like it to also support an HTTP proxy.

We would like the feature to implement the privileged access management. However, we have heard that it is already supported.

It is very stable.

Technical support is very good.

We had a previous solution. It was Control-M. We switched because there were some issues around the costs. Automic's costs were lower.

We had some consultants when we started with it. They gave us an introduction and training. We also have training every year at CA Automic in Nürnberg.

We did not evaluate anyone else for job scheduling.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Support
• It is a fast solution.
• The product minimizes downtime.
• Good reputation.

The abstraction - I call it the "who, what, and where" of pieces of work that need to be done in the IT world. The who: the log-in, the credentials, all those things. The where: as far as the agents and those things. Then the what: the actual worker objects themselves. Having those abstracted and separated allows us to move things from one environment to the next, and it allows consistency and testing. We can abstract those three different layers. To me, that's one of the biggest advantages of the tool.

How technology agnostic it is. It works with all the different legacy solutions we have and it allows us to look at things in one location, as opposed to going to a lot of different places.

• More Hadoop native support for things such as Oozie jobs, Spark jobs.
• Native support for messaging architecture like with your RabbitMQ, your Kafkas. 

More native support for - we talk about the software factory with services and that new architecture - more native support for interacting with those things.

Very stable. The tool we had before this tool, we were nervous around patching cycles, and we were nervous for datacenter downtime because we didn't how that tool was going to react. But this tool, far better than the tool we had before and we probably don't even really have to think about the stability. It's sort of like a good piece of software is like a good referee. If it's doing good, you don't notice it. That's the good thing about Automic. We don't even notice that it's there a lot of the time. It's a very, very stable product.

Very scalable. I know they just talked about adding support for hundreds of thousands of agents, and I know it goes up to like a thousand clients per engine, so you can do a lot with that. It's a very scalable solution. We have a lot more capacity probably than we have use cases for it right now.

Technical support has been good. With any type of support structure, you're going to have challenges with geographies and things getting passed off, but generally Automic has been very supportive. Their Professional Services department: excellent, A1. And they really give you that "partner" feel, as opposed to the customer-vendor. We still have that relationship, but when there are actual issues, it feels more like a partner situation as opposed to a "You're the vendor, I'm the customer."

I give it an eight out of 10. The functionality is great, the scripting language is very powerful. They can adapt to most use cases. Very good community of different companies and a user base so when we have problems we can go to other people.

Why it didn't get a 10, there are too many windows. If you're getting deep into some of these workflows, you may have 20 different windows open and, if you didn't already have that deep understanding of how enterprise orchestration works, it would be very overwhelming to get up to speed on something like that. 

It needs some type of way - and I don't even know what that looks like, but I know when it doesn't feel good - to minimize the amount of windows and get it to where you could have all the information you need available on the screen; or more dynamic so you don't have this clutter on your screen.

We are using Automic in a wide range of operations in our production site and our disaster recovery site. In addition, we are using it in our production site as an ITSM integration tool.

I am using Automic Workload Automation for disaster recovery, and its monitoring capabilities and its scalability for our operations. It is very good.

The SSH agent is missing in version 12.1. Maybe it would be a good addition to see on the web client of the next version of Atomic.

We have been using Automic for two and a half years. It is very rare to have a problem. If we have databases working well, Automic has never let us down.

It is very scalable. We use it in every aspect of our IT operations, and the scalability is very good.

Turkey was our technical support during the project phase. They always help us to grow our jobs, automate new things, and when a new version comes they quickly adopt to the product.

We were not previously using another product. However, we did have our own automation solution (scripting). Before Automic, there was no automation product.

In the beginning, it is hard. We did not know how to deal with things. However, when the process is ongoing, it is very easy to set up and build infrastructure on Automic.

I will give it an eight out of 10, because no product is as good as a 10. There is room for improvement for Automic, but I am pleased to use it.

We use it for scheduling of our production and development.

It helps us manage production and provides an overview of production along with a review of past performance.

The most important thing is having no downtime. We do not have any downtime for support or release changes.

It is easy to manage and customize the system. It performs well.

Today, we use a rich client for this product. In the future, or for the next release, they will be using a web interface. This web interface is not as scalable as the rich client for us. The web client is not 100 percent programmed as we need it.

It is 100% stable. We have no downtime. We have 24/7 production throughout the year.

It has a good source code that we administrate. We can expand the system.

It has endless scalably. We can add new Clients from zero to 9,999, and we only use 10 Clients. We can add agents up to 500,000. We can also add RAM, disk space, and CPUs. 

In the early years, when using the product, we had many phone calls with technical support. Sometimes those calls were good, sometimes they were bad. It has been getting better.

In the past, we had CA-7. CA built this mainframe schedule. Then, we have canceled the contract to CA, and decided to go with UC4. Now, UC4 is a part of CA, and now we have a contract with CA again.

Sometimes it was simple, and other times, it was very difficult. However, we had good technical support from Automic designing our system.

We had an employee from Atomic design the system for us.

I would recommend Automic with some restrictions.

We have many systems, like SAP, Linux, and Windows systems. We use it for crossover and production, beginning from Host to SAP to Windows, to make a print page for all our users and customers. It is not possible do our jobs without automation software. Automic is a great help to us.

We have been using automation since 2003 (version 263.G). Today, we are at version 10 and looking to upgrade. However, we do not what version will to upgrade to due to our hardware requirements. We must check if what we have is okay, or if we must buy some more servers, laptops, and screens. Therefore, we are checking out versions 11 and 12, or we deciding if we should wait for 12.2. We are seeing what other are doing and determining what the problems for a migration might be.

The main things that we use it for are job control and batch. For these, it does very well.

We not use all features nor all the add-ons.

Version 10 is stable. New software never comes out without some problems. That is the problem when you go with new. Therefore, we are waiting a little bit, since it is very important that the software is stable. In the near future, we must have a stable software that we can do our job yesterday, today, and tomorrow. This is the most important thing; you must trust the software. 

When you look at other technical support hotlines, the Automic team is very good.

The hotline can take a long time. They will say, "I will take it and give it to the Level 2 support." That is okay. We do the same thing in our company, like a front office cleaning calls. I still do not like it. It means more team more time waiting for a good technical answer and solution. That is a problem. Unfortunately, we can't request having 20 technical support teams dedicated our business. 

We have using Automic for long time. From the first step, you need to have time to install it. When you want to use the entirety of Automic, it is heavy. In the beginning, our administration chief told us to use 10 percent of your time for Automic administration. Now, we are using 100 percent (our entire job); it is a full-time job.

Our systems are not that big. When we have trouble or have updates, it is a full-time job. We must talk with other teams. We must see that the hotfixes are updated. This cannot be done in ten minutes as some modules and add-ons come together, and we must see how to orchestrate it within our company. We must look at these things, which are part of the company, see how they can be used. We spend a lot of time of this.

We are an insurance company, so we are using Automic Workload Automation to control all of the night processes, the batch processes, and also the EDW. It is for controlling the other databases that we are using. We take all the data from the S400 and move it to other databases in order to do queries and gather other information. We also use it to control between a lot of other systems because we do a lot of workflow between other computers, so we can control the time and flow and other things.

The feature that I have found most valuable is that we can control between a lot of operating systems and other products because we have a lot of old and new products in our environment. It helps us to control all of them together.

In terms of what can be improved, we are in Israel, so we work in Hebrew. Now they are starting to move it also from English to Hebrew and to support the language, but for us it has been very difficult because the Hebrew looks like gibberish. So there are language issues.

The price could always be improved.

Now we are starting to check the AI, which is a new product there which can give us more information like Iosoft and other things. I hope it can help us because right now we cannot know when we can improve or not because we only see part of the data. I hope that if we can collect all the data we can improve and maybe use less CPUs in S400, but at least we can improve by knowing what happened in our batch processes. Meaning, how much time and how much CPU it takes not only for one month but to see all the information for one year. This can improve our flow.

I have been using Automic Workload Automation for more than 15 years. Now I'm using the latest version.

It is not stable all the time. Just now, we upgraded and we found out that it does not support the requirement that is an important computer in our environment, so the new version is not stable right now. I spoke with them and I hope they understand that they have to fix this.

Automic Workload Automation is scalable.

I not remember the number using it because we are always adding more and more. We add a lot of servers to this because we took the daytime process and brought it to our other system. In the Automic, I think we have about 50 users or something like that and a thousand processors.

We only have four people for maintenance of the solution here, and that's all. It is not complicated.

We are using this product extensively and I think we have plans to increase the usage.

We added the new features and we are looking to make our environment do things automatically, less manually.

Our license is for three years, or something like that.

My advice to anyone considering Automic is to know how they will use it, because they changed the license type. Previously, we used to pay for each computer. Now we pay for all the environment, no matter how much we use.

We change the license for the processors, but it depends on the environment that you want to automate, so I cannot give any advice. It depends on what you want. If you only have a few computers that you want to use, you can use it by computer, by your agents. If you have a lot of processors, don't pay for the processors. It depends on the type of environment you use it in. Sometimes you prefer to do it with the scheduling if you have a lot of workflows.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give Automic Workload Automation an eight. This is because of the language and stability issues.

We use it for the following:

• Automation
• Server positioning
• File transfer solutions
• Daily business processes
• Different processes.
  

• All the possibilities, like scripting different objects. 
• All the components that can be used to design workflows; process automation. 

There are some problems when using the new interface, which is normal, as it is a new technology. In the future, it will be much better. Hopefully, Automic is working hard on the issue.

We would like to see critical path analyzers. I am not sure if it is coming. If it does, out-of-the-box would be nice. We would also like improved SLR monitoring. There are SLR objects, but I can't define an SLR object plus one, or end days. I can only do it for one day. As we are time shifting to another day, it is not possible. This should be improved.

The performance is nice. The stability is very good. We do not have any problems concerning the stability. We have never had any major problems. We have had minor problems, but it has not crashed hard. It runs our business safely.

We have one server, and it has enough hardware with no problems at all. 

In the last two years, the reaction times were not so good. However, in the last four to six months, my experience has with them has been a lot faster. People are called back five minutes after I establish a ticket or incident. They are often doing WebEx and web sessions to get to the point, not making us write 50 pages, then not providing a solution.

It was 13 years ago, we previously used Control-M and switched to UC4. This was a management decision.

I did it 13 years ago at different companies. In the past, we did not use the wizard. We set up the components standalone, then combined them in configuration. It was easy and well documented. 

Presently, there is a problem with the translation. It is some type of hybrid. We have some parts in German and some in English. It should be completely in German and completely in English. It should be better in the future.

We receive time efficiency from this product. For example, some users use to manually transfer many files from A to B, and we have automated this task. We used to have complex solutions just to gain information from files, read files, put in a customer filter, or share something. In the past, many people had to look into the files manually. 

No competitor has this mass possibilities to design processors for automation solutions.

Test it for a long time. You have to look if it fits into the mindset of your company.

Main criteria when selecting a vendor: 

We look to other companies about the following:

• What do they use? 
• How is their experience? 
• Does the support work? 
• How quick is the support? 
• How good is the documentation? 
• How good is the vendor concerning new technologies and time to market new solutions in the software?

Primary use case is for scheduling of our LCM, our Loyal Customer Mailers. Mailers go out with coupon packets for different households. Automic is used for scheduling all of the jobs that build those mailers, and send them off to the printer.

Performance-wise, we do run into problems sometimes, because we've only had it for about a year and a half. We're still working out some kinks as far as performance goes. But overall the performance of the tool itself has been pretty good. At first, it was a little bit slow, but we've worked out a lot of those performance issues over time, it's working a lot better now.

For me the biggest one is flexibility. It allows you to do so many things on so many different platforms. We have an Oracle shop that runs off of Oracle packages that are executed from Linux boxes. With that, whatever platform it touches, it can allow you to do so many different things. We can take the power of Linux, the power of Oracle and, inside Automic, we can just build our own little packages, and our own little toys, to go out there and do things.

For instance, one that I'm working on right now is to build test data to run extracts against production data. To build smaller tables, subset tables, for the development teams on the test side. It's a little bit like building my own version of TDM. But Automic allows me to do that, and to be able to schedule it, to go out on its own and do copies of these tables, on a regularly planned schedule. It makes it very powerful.

Number one, A+, is the scripting language, and the ability to go in, and take an already robust, consistent, strong tool, and turn it into an incredibly scalable, flexible tool, that you can literally do anything you want to with.

Back in the old days, I would think, "Okay, if I need a specific job done, I would think, what type of Shell script, or maybe a Python program, would I have to right to get this done?" Now I can do everything inside of Automic itself, using Shell scripts, or using the Automic scripting language itself; makes it very powerful.

A problem we've had is where file transfers are being kicked-off from one server to another, without us doing it. It's something internal to Automic that's doing it. And it is costing a little bit of performance, and it's a time issue, on the zero client. But otherwise, it's not affecting the other product issues.

I would also like to see a little bit more connectivity, more, "Play nice with other toys." For instance, we have IServ as our primary tool for our service request tickets. In order for it to play nice with Automic, we had to actually create a file and put it somewhere, where Automic can see it. I would like to see more connectivity with other tools, or more compatibility with other tools.

A little less button clicking, in the navigation of the tool itself would also help. There is a lot out there, and I understand that's what keeps the tool robust. It keeps our options open, but it's a bit click-y sometimes. To get where you need to go, you have to go through 10 levels.

The stability of the tool is fantastic. In the year and a half, it's really only gone down a couple of times. The tool itself is very stable.

What's nice is that it splits it up into clients. We have our own client where we do our own work. We don't have to cross into the path of other people; they can do their own work on their own client. From an organizational standpoint, that makes it very easy to use. The stability of the piece itself, has been proven pretty well.

The scalability is out of this world. We're a shop that has about 40 clients. When I say "clients", we have our own group, our own area to work in - production - and a couple of test environments. That's three clients. We've got about forty or fifty clients in our company. Different groups have their production, test, and development areas. But we can scale that out to 300 or 500 clients if we need to, without changing anything. It's a logical division, not a physical one.

The scalability of the tool itself, is really fantastic. It lets you work in your own silo, and you can have as many silos as you want.

We changed out from Chronicle to Automic in 90 days, without a single outage to our business. That has never been done with Automic. The Automic people were even saying, "How the heck did y'all do that?"

But we had some people from Automic, this was before CA bought them out. Some guys from Automic came over to our site, stayed in Cincinnati for a couple weeks, to help us with this initial setup, because it was such a time crunch. We had 90 days to get it in, and we had to pull the switch on Chronicle, or else it was going to cost us $1.5 million. It was a big time crunch, and they helped us get it in, get it working. We did not have any outage, we did not miss any Loyal Customer campaigns. Nobody missed the coupons because of our switch to Automic.

In terms of selecting tools, the important criteria are 

• the fit of the tool
• cost of the tool
• support of the tool. 

That's the one, two, three I think everybody would answer.

Do the demo, and don't be scared of the Automic scripting language, because it's easy, if your team is technical at all. It's good to learn, it's easy to learn, and it just makes the tool explode with possibilities.