Automic Automation Reviews

We have all of our payroll being done in the platform. There are a lot of different processes that need to be taken care of, and they all need to be linked together. When you put them into a workflow, and you know that you've built logic into that workflow, and you have alerting, it's something you can step back from. You don't have to be worried about every single piece of that puzzle. If something goes wrong, you have confidence that some alerting will let you know. It streamlines, it makes things go faster, less eyes on glass.

This product has really helped Comcast and the organization streamline a lot of independent jobs that we might have had. We can take something from crontab, something that's very nitty-gritty and low-level, and be able to put it into a nice interface, and be able to track it at every junction along the way, add alerting, all kinds of stuff, interdependencies. The list goes on and on.

I'll start by saying, one of the big features that they did implement, that a lot of people, us included, were asking for for a long time, is the ability to do zero downtime upgrades. They have introduced that. We haven't gotten to that version yet. That's the dream. 

Honestly, this is a hard question for me to to answer because we're so far back. I just want to get to the point where we can see and use the features that they have added, that we just haven't even been able to touch yet.

All products have downtime. In our specific example, the product has become so critical for our organization that taking the necessary plan-maintenance, to do patching and upgrading, that has become a challenge for us. We're several versions behind now. 

Outages that we incur are at least partially our fault at this point, because our reliance on the platform has become so much that it's a struggle to even upgrade. That aside, we see some downtime from time to time. But I think some of it is self-incurred. We would do ourselves a favor in working on this, to get the platform upgraded to get to the more stable, bugs-are-fixed, and things of that nature.

I just saw a session here (at the CA World conference). We're nowhere near this, but the vendor - CA, Automic - they just increased scalability way more. Like I said, we'll probably never get to this, the point that they've increased it to. 

It's very scalable. We have two nodes that are highly available. You can add new nodes if you need that. You can take a node, a total node, down and still be operating fine. It has a lot of scaling to it.

Initially, is it hard to set up? I don't really think so. I've been working with it for a while now. Once you understand how something works, it becomes pretty easy. 

I'll say this, support team there have been really great, very enthusiastic. Will answer your questions, and that helps a lot. A lot of it is, you don't know what you don't know. Once you do, you've got it figured out.

In terms of upgrading, it's very database-driven. You have to upgrade the database, and then just replace binaries, new software.

When selecting a vendor, support is really important, cost is always a factor. The licensing model can play into it. My team works with several tools, other CA tools and some other company tools. The licensing model can really be a burden, and just takes a lot of time and cycles away from other work that you want to be doing. Things like that. But yes, I think support's a big one. Definitely being able to work with them, knowing that they're there, knowing that they have the aptitude.

I'd rate it an eight out of 10 probably, being honest. I don't have a lot of experience with other tools. 

I think it's great. I think it does what we need it to do. Again, reliability. I think we hurt ourselves a little bit. But they take the product very seriously. They're improving it all the time. I get a lot of excitement. It's hard not to be excited being in this environment (at the CA World conference) and seeing the people that work on it, and seeing the TED Talks, etc. I'm excited to get to the next level. I'm tired of not being able to get there.

Workload automation. We are using it for job scheduling and automation of our internal business processes to eliminate a lot of manual workaround.

It is performing very well. We are getting ready to upgrade to version 12. We have been running 10 for the last four and a half years, and we have had a really good experience with the product. 

It has made everybody more efficient and productive. So, it eliminates a lot of the manual workaround processes, which enables our business to get more out of its people, which is always good. 

The ability to be able to automate more of our business processes: 

1. It gives us a lot of leverage in terms of what we can do with the product. 
2. The predictive analytics portion, which is the reporting capability, gives us a lot of useful data.

Keep enhancing the analytics piece. We are just getting involved with that, so we have not had the reporting functionality previously in version 10. We have seen and heard a lot of good things about it. In talking with other customers as well, they would like to see a few enhancements done where you can pull in outside data sources to get a cumulative view from one centralized place.

I think this is something that they are currently working on. This is exciting news for us, because we are definitely looking forward to it.

Stability has been very good. We have not had any major issues or very much downtime at all. If we have had downtime, it has been planned. So, stability has never been an issue for us. 

Scalability scales up and down. We are a fairly small shop right now. I would say we are scaling. We are slowly growing, but we are not anywhere on the scale of what the product can handle, especially talking with other customers that are much bigger than we are. 

We have had no issues with the scalability so far.

On a scale of one to 10, I would say, probably a seven. 

We have had some issues recently going through the process of trying to upgrade from version 10 to 12. Working with support, we have gone back and forth a lot, and a lot of that has had to do with resources not being available either on their side or on our side. 

From that perspective, it could probably improve a little bit, but overall, we are very satisfied. 

I was not involved in the initial setup, but I have been involved in the current upgrade process.

The current upgrade process is straightforward. They have made the process much simpler. After we get to version 12 and any subsequent versions going forward, it should not require any downtime at all. It should not require any system reboots for the upgrade of other components outside of the engine itself, such as the agents.

No. We just decided to stay with what we had because we have had really good luck with it and we are very satisfied with the product. 

We are very satisfied with the solution as a whole. There is a lot of new functionality that we are excited about. We have not had any real major problems systematically with the solution. Overall, with the product, we are very satisfied. There are a few areas that we feel like, from CA's perspective, could be improved, one of those being support. The other being new additional features and functionality that we as customers are looking forward to. 

Consider what you are trying to accomplish with a product like this. Definitely list out all the pros and cons of solutions. Make sure the solutions you are looking at fulfill your business requirements. There are a lot of solutions in the marketplace that have a lot of bells and whistles that may or may not be of benefit to certain companies. Make sure when you are looking at solutions and potential partners that the solutions that you are looking at fit your business needs.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• The level of trust. From a customer perspective, it certainly factors into that.
• The relationship with account managers. 
• How attentive they are to our business needs and how we are evolving as a company as a whole. 
• The overall functionality of the solution that the partners provide. There are a lot of other competing products in the marketplace, so that certainly factors into it as well. 
• We are looking for specific needs and requirements from our business partners, and that certainly throws a big chunk of how we interact and consider what solutions we are going to bring in for our business. 

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 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.

• 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 many clients in financial services. We install, implement, and configure this solution for them. They use this solution to automate financial processes.

We have roughly 100 users, using this solution. We expect to increase the number of users of this solution.

There are some monitoring features that could be added. For example, when we have some external dependencies from processes that were run the day before or one week before, these dependencies are always complicated to configure.

Workload Automation should also have better RPA features, too. I think that would definitely improve this solution. Instead of having to have a separate solution for RPA, it would be nice if Workload Automation could handle it, too.

I have been using Automic Workload Automation for more than 10 years.

Both the stability and the scalability of Automic Workload Automation are great.

Usually, we only contact support when we have issues with bugs, etc. I think some users have support for installation and configuration.

I have used plenty of automation solutions. 

I made the move over to Automic Workload Automation as many other solutions weren't compatible with REST APIs. For me, it was a matter of evolution. The new solutions come with more features, more updated technologies that I can use. 

The initial setup, installation, and configuration are very straightforward.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of eight. If they added some additional features for monitoring, I would give it a higher rating.

If you're in need of RPA capabilities, this may not be the solution for you. RPA can be applied for some processes, but not for everything. 

Work Automation is a worldwide product which has a lot of utilities. It can be very helpful for use with customers' data, and it is very quick with utilizations, customizations, etc, so we can meet the customers' needs.

Customers save a lot of money when they use this product, because of things like the scheduling tool. I know several companies which are not using it. Overall, it seems more expensive, because Workload Automation can save a lot of time and human resources.

It does give our customers a competitive advantage in their space.

Its stability.

From Workload Automation, which is missing for me personally, is a workload portion. I can see dependencies of the job directly in the graphical view, therefore I would not have to use the search button to search for every object every time that I needed to see if it was a predecessor.  

For the user interface of version 12.1, I cannot find a lot of utilities and objects from previous versions, making me change my habits. This is not good.

I am working with Workload Automation for more than ten years, when it was named UC4, then renamed again, etc. We have never had big problems with stability of this product.

The performance is very good. If there are problems, they will be caused by somebody doing something wrong. Usually the product does not have a lot of problems, and we did recognize when the application has failed due to errors.

You can do a lot of customization and build your architecture and hierarchy as you want it.

Since you are able to save resources and costs, you can grow your business.

We do not contact support very often. Most answers are in the documentation.

When we install the version 12.0 and 12.1, AVI caused some problems, but after opened a ticket to technical support, they responded quickly with a great answer.

I would recommend to definitely try the product.

Our customers use it to control executions of jobs on different platforms, systems, applications, and technologies. There is a huge variety.

• It reduces operational costs and increases quality.
• The problem handling is much easier than doing it manually.
• It improves the visibility of what is going on on the system. If I have a problem, it is easy to identify, understand dependencies, and identifying the root causes than just running through scripts and searching through applications or servers.

• Reliability
• Transparency
• Its processes are repeatable.
• Easy to manage.

These are the most important features.

The versioning and support for the lifecycle of Automic's developed solution is what we were missing. However, this is coming in version 12.2, so I am looking forward to seeing how it works.

If you implemented with Service Pack 4 or 5, then its fine. The first version tends to be rather unstable.

The product has huge potential. I never sold its huge potential for scalability.

If the issue is a repeatable issue known to the support team, then you can expect a prompt answer. The problem with the support is if the issue is new, then it is challenging for them.

The application is straightforward to setup. What is sometimes challenging is making the application fit into the customers' environment. They may have some restrictions and restraints that we need to consider and also need to understand how to prepare. Therefore, it is rather an organizational challenge rather than a technical one.

Our customers' environments are not manageable without Automic. Their environments are so big and complex without automating them, they would not be able to run their businesses at all.

Our customers also evaluated Tivoli and BMC. 

Definitely go for Automic.

Most important criteria when our customers are selecting a vendor: One of the outside most important features versus competitors, we are able to orchestrate control.