Automic Automation Reviews

We use it to automate our business processes. It is just for automation and scheduling.

We have worked about 20 years with this product. We have migrated for 20 years from CA to Automic. It is very interesting. Now, we are back to CA, because they have taken over the Automic company. The benefits also include the automation of our processes. We have worked mostly with SAP software, and we have other things in our plans. We want to automate the distribution of servers, so clients can make a request from ServiceNow. That way, companies can order servers on the internet that we normally we would build during the process for internal use. Because developers sometimes need a very fast machine for testing, you can click in ServiceNow to request a machine after two hours, then you can have a machine to plug into. At the moment, we have tried to make this a digitalized process, although we have a problem with ServiceNow.

It is easy to integrate different systems in one platform, then to automate it. You have a job, then one part of the job is going to the SAP system, and the other one is going to ServiceNow or to another system. Then, they all combine into one process.

The very special feature that we use is the connection to ServiceNow.

It does not have the same functions as the old version, which makes our developers angry because because they must work with this tool. We going forward it may not be possible.

CA has missed the product's focus. We have a lot of developers in our company, and we are experiencing the same problem. However, the CA company has not seen that developers and clients are having a problem, which is not good for the product that we do. CA took over the Automic company last year, and we do not think this was a good direction for the product.

I would like to see the rich client with the product for the developers.

It is more important for us to have a longer, stabler releases. We do not need so many features. This is a problem of bigger companies where the management wants new features, but the product has no stability after that.

It would be good to have a mobile app, where you can monitor your process, just to see if it is running or if it is blocked. The user interface on the web is not good for the developers. Features are missing, and for the client, it is too complex. At the moment, we build our own UI. We have programmers in Java API, and we have a Client which works on the mobile phone. It can start jobs, make the schedules stop and start, and see the statistics on a smartphone.

We have had issues with the performance. We have a job now in production, but the product is not very stable. ServiceNow creates problems with the Automic entry of the connector, so the stability could be a little bit better with this product.

Sometimes, we have some performance problems. I am not sure it is because of the software. It might be because we have a huge amount of objects in our system. In this case, it can happen that we often have performance problems. I am not sure if it is because of the product, it is more because of the objects in our system.

Because the product is based on the SQL Database, we have too many activations. The scalability is limited by the SQL in the background, and that is a problem. If you want to take jobs to other systems, you must build the developer our way. At the moment, we are building a new system. We have it for every country and have separated it for machines. It is mostly getting better, but the scalability to build it on new systems or to split it is not so easy.

We have technical support. We also have a connection in Austria with the support colleagues there. 

The first step: You must describe the problem. At the most, filling in a checklist.

Then: It helps to take the telephone, and talk to a technical engineer directly. 

That is why their technical support is very good.

Mostly, we contact support because our problems are very complex. Normally, we find problems that they have never knew about before. We have new technology and build actions on the automation system, then we find objects which can work with those actions, because we have technical limitations. 

We have a contact within the support, and also with a freelance in Austria. We have worked together with several people to find a solution for this new philosophy. Automic states you should build everything with actions and take multiple actions with business processes. However, not all objects are usable for actions that we see.

If you would have to start all your jobs manually, it would cost you a lot of time and money.

You do not need any humans to start jobs, so you can save a lot of money.

From the bad products, the Automic is the best. All products in the market are not good since they are simple workload scheduling. There are some things are missing in the Automic product, which our management does not see.

I would recommend using Automic.

The visibility into what normally a monolithic script would do with the audit trail and version control features makes troubleshooting jobs a breeze. I use to have to manually code in logging tricks into my scripts, then parse though these file to see what was happening during execution. With AWA, I simply view the last run, or any previous run, and can visually see what happened with the ability to drill down to a specific part of the workflow. Viewing past modifications to objects would require a third party version management product with a check-out/check-in process; with Automic, every save is shown in a tab on the object.

The main improvement is the time it saves in troubleshooting an issue. The common phrase, “There is a script somewhere that does that”, is no longer heard. A single pane of glass view and visual representation of workflows exponentially reduces time to recovery.

The direction of the product and the way that they add visibility into a script are amazing, but there are limitations in self administration automation and stability issues.

There are two main areas which I think the product needs to improve on:

1. Improving automated administration of the product itself. As an administrator, it is easy for me to manage another product using Automic, but when I want to manage the product itself, I’m forced to writing Java console apps using their API to do things. There are community provided solutions to help, but they are not tested enough to be considered production safe.
2. The stability of the product. It is very easy to take down the system. Even with HA infrastructure underneath, we still have constant outages.

Personally, I’ve use this product for 18 months. The organization has used it almost 5 years.

Yes, as mentioned before, we are constantly having issues due to bugs or things that should work, but don’t. In a high demand, time critical environment, it is not viewed as a reliable product requiring use of external means to continue when there is an outage.

No, it is extremely easy to scale up or down. Adding an Agent or an Automation Engine is simply connecting or removing it. Adding new workflows and tasks require no redesign inside the application.

To be honest, I have had to come up with the majority of the fixes to my issues, and the times that I couldn’t were known bugs. We are a company where an hour or two outages majorly impact us and their support SLAs do not come close to ours.

The company previously used AutoSys. To my understanding, they switched for cost reasons.

I was told that it took over six months and was difficult.

I don’t have much to do with this, but I’ve been told it is cheaper than the competition.

I wasn’t around for this.

Setting up a new installation is straightforward and easy. It is well documented on their site.

We want to automate our processes. Before, we used to execute more than more than 250 jobs manually, along with a number of things related to backups, and putting files on FTP. 

Previously, in IT Operations, this function was used to induct resources. It's a type of training platform for them to understand operations as an entry point. We used to take four to six months to train a resource. After the implementation of Automic, it hardly takes a month to develop a resource.

Most of the monotonous types of jobs have been automated. We have been able to train our resources very quickly, so we can put their focus on high value things. Also, it has created a knowledge base, which has helped us to pinpoint problems. After a month, we found out that seven out of ten times, there was a specific problem. So, we fixed these issues, optimized them, and now, we have a situation where we are running with zero errors.

The best thing about the product is its agility. 

It is a complete solution: people, process, and technology.

CA needs to add a few more products in this suite, because right now they have automation, DR switching, and the third one is relief management. They could add change and release management.

It's pretty stable. After implementation, there hasn't been a single event where we shifted our jobs for the day from automated to manual.

We haven't seen any issues related to scalability.

The tech support trained our resources to be self-sufficient.

Automic has been a Greenfield project. We were the first implementation and a number of banks went with this solution after us.

The implementation was not straightforward, though it is not that complex. During installation, some database elective issues popped up. These took some time to fix, but after some back and forth communication, these issues were resolved.

A few things were out-of-the-box. However, during the implementation, a number of things popped up which required coding, implementation, or electrical work, and the Automic team was able to fix these very quickly. 

The implementation people were very good, along with the experience. They know their job. They know the product. They understood the requirements very well. It took three to four months time to rollout this project into production.

This is a support system for us, not our core business, so we purchased this product inexpensively. Later on, we came to a very good deal, but it took us three years to finalize.

We recently purchased the whole suite. 

Anything that can be automated, should be automated. The world is changing and new things are coming out a daily basis. These things take away your day-to-day spend, give you ample time to look forward, and streamline your workflow.

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.

Our primary use case is automating and integrating different workloads and systems to populate data warehouses and different applications.

It allows us to free up developers' time from not having to set up environments, but actually using different environments. It allows us to have accountability and traceability of changes. It also allows us to be in the mainstream with what a lot of other companies are using, so it is easy to get a transfer of skills and be able to collaborate with other people in the field, because we are using a more popular tool. 

1. The modulation of some of the things, like how the things are connected and disconnected. You have different login objects that you can quickly put to other different objects and other objects that you create, which makes transporting things very easy from one environment to the next. 
2. I like the documentation that is out there. It is very good and the community that comes with it is really good. It provides a lot of different use cases similar to ours that people have for specific things which we can go out, look at, and receive some help on. 
3. It is very technology agnostic. It fits with pretty much all the different types of technology, different types of servers, and different other types of languages that we use; it fits in very well with everything.

There has to be a better way to visualize things in the application without having so many windows open. That is just an on its face type thing. If you get in deep into some of these processes, you may have 20 windows open, and there has to be an easier way to manage that. The actual components that they have are great. Just the presentation of it; sometimes I feel like there is too much on the screen and I want to simplify it. I want to get to the information that I need to without wasting my time trying to expand this window or trying to click this and do all that. So that is my one downside the tool. They need to figure out how to reduce the number of windows that you can have open. It is more of an aesthetic thing, but it helps your functionality out because you get to the crux of problems a little quicker when you do not have to surf through 20 different windows.

At my company, if there is a limit, we are going to find it. Everything has a finite limit. No matter what people tell you about any type of software, it is always a finite limit. However, compared to other competitors' software packages, this has been a lot more stable, but no software is completely stable. If there's a limit, we're gonna find it. Our company pushes the envelope when it comes to the data we process, display, and publish to our users, so sometimes we find those limits. Overall, especially since we have dealt with the competitor for a number of years before we switched over to Automic CA, it has been pretty stable. 

It seems very scalable. 

It is one of things, where there are a 100 ways to do something, and that is a good thing and a bad thing. You can do it the bad way and it will not be scalable, or you can do it the better way and it will be scalable. So, on its face, it is very scalable, but it definitely depends on how you implement it. 

They have been pretty good. We have had the professional services company uses some of the budget to bring some of those guys in to work on specific problems and they are very interactive and very responsive. 

I have not really had any issues. However, if there is a limit, we are going to find it. It does not matter what, and whose name is on the technology.

I was heavily involved in the initial setup. It was December 2015 that we had to migrate our entire workload automation suite of 1000s of jobs. We are publishing petabytes worth of data into this big relational data warehouse, publishings, all these different applications. We probably received 2000 files per week, and probably had 5000 jobs per week. Therefore, we had to migrate all that from one solution to another solution in 60 days. It was a contract thing that was going on, so we had to do it and I was heavily involved. We had some professional services people come down and we found out about it in mid-December and we were done by the first week of February. So, it was a heroic effort, but we did it.

I got brought in when they signed the contract.

There are some things that could be more intuitive in the tool. There is a lot of functionality, but the presentation of it could probably be better. It is a very powerful tool which allows for portability of code through different environments.

Get out there and research what the community is doing and different use cases. Take a look at the community and look at the feedback that the community is giving. It is a very user driven community. It is not driven from CA. It is driven from the users themselves, so I definitely go take a look at the user feedback, then think about the management and the implementation of this tool, which are very important. 

Back to the first thing, "There are 100 ways to do everything." Therefore, you have to come to a consensus on, "This is the way we are going to do it", and have some standards upfront, because it is going to be a harder once you get into it using the tool. With any workload automation tool, it is the backbone of your organization. Once you start using, it is hard to change. Think about the implementation and best practices upfront and listen to the feedback from the user community.

• Web based GUI is available that can be handled from any device including desktop/laptop/phones.
• $U works on various OS platforms and has integration with a number of applications such as SAP, ORACLE, FTP, etc.
• No server agent architecture but still has a central management system so that you can manage all $U effortlessly. And you can manage security and authorization easily.

Single tool used for all automation requirements to handle all types of jobs such as Oracle, FTP, SAP, etc.

Reporting facility could be better.

I've been using it for 2+ years.

No issues as such. Installation and management is easy.

No issues with stability. Highly stable environment.

No issues with scalability. Can handle large number of servers or batch jobs without issues.

Technical support is good. 10 out of 10. There is a web-based GUI to record all your issues and track them. Immediate help is available in crisis situations.

No.

Initial setup is quite simple. Also all required documentation is available as well as support is available from vendor.

Implementation was in-house.

Good solution for a complex environment.

Pricing and licensing costs are based on number of servers. It is up to budget and a small scale/mid scale organisation can opt for this tool.

No.

If you are looking for solution for all your automation needs within a good budget you should go for this tool. It has all the required features which can compete with all other scheduling tools in market.

We have been using CA products, for maybe 20 years, for managing workloads. 

It will improve how we function. It is just meeting a functional need in a maybe more agile way; it is faster. People put labels on it: Agile or DevOps. Really what they are doing with the new product is improving your transformation and making it quick.

The frustration that we have probably had in the past is where CA tools run for a period of time, then they get deprecated, and you have to build a new one. What we like about Automic, they are new to the CA family, and there seems to be an ease of the migration. So, there is lot more automation going from the old product to the new product.

During the PoC, it was easy to use.

At the moment, it is as scalable as we need it to be.

We spun it up during a weekend.

It ticked all the boxes. We were looking at WLMD, Automic, or CCM to have more future proof capability than what we would like. You have got the functionality and everything like that. What we would like seemed to be a strategic product, whereas maybe in the past it was a lot of by-products, use it and throw it away. So that appealed to us.

We actually got to physically use the product before saying, "Yes."

We also looked at BMC PATROL, and I think two things impressed me versus BMC:

1. The tool fit and the migration were a lot more automated.
2. CA company engagement.

Try the solution. Give it a go. It has worked for us.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Focused on SaaS products.

I primarily use Automic Automation for financial technology feedback.

Automic Automation has helped us with executing scripting in various environments, including Linux, Windows, and SAP.

Automic Automation's most valuable features are perspective analytics and coding.

I've been using Automic Automation for a year.

Automic Automation's stability is okay.

Automic Automation's scalability is excellent.

I would not recommend using Automic's technical support for complex problems.

The initial setup was complex.

Automic Automation's pricing is excellent, especially in comparison to similar solutions.

I would give Automic Automation a rating of eight out of ten.