Automic Automation Reviews

We are currently doing a migration from Dollar U to ONE Automation for 815 applications for one of our clients.

We have used ONE Automation to make a platform for one of our clients using two clustered Oracle Databases and web services, with an Automation Engine. 

We made another platform for backup using Data Guard and two web services with two Automation Engines and one Oracle Database, so if there is a problem with the first platform, functionality can pass directly to the second platform.

I have found new methods for converting scripts from Dollar U to ONE Automation. For example, I take the dynamic library from Dollar U and put it in the dynamic binary library in ONE Automation. This enables us to use Dollar U scripts in ONE Automation.

It's easy for integration, not like BMC Control-M. It's clear when there are errors or bugs. We can just go to the logs and read the error code and find what needs to be done.

There were many bugs in the last version. For example, we could only use capital letters for searching for agent names. Also, we had a problem with ONE Automation where we couldn't use the PGA and SGA in Oracle Databases for resolving RAM because the last version didn't have this capability.

We can use ONE Automation with many other applications like ServiceNow and Jenkins. This is the scalability for me, that there are many possibilities with this tool. We can use it with many other technologies. It is really good.

The company where we are doing this work is looking at expanding into banking, and that would happen in many countries. Of course, this would give us more work with Automic Workload Automation. The objective is that all applications for this client are within ONE Automation.

I do not contact CA technical support but my colleague does for many bugs and other security and system requirements. We need to change many things in our platform for security needs. We open cases with ONE Automation to help us with the skills for integration, development, and administration. Tech support has been helpful.

I used Dollar U. There are really big differences. Dollar U has decentralized methods and tools. ONE Automation has centralized tools. It is really strong and really easy to use ONE Automation. For example, for organizing, for creating applications and clients, for manipulating the agents, for the servers, it's really easy. You just put the agent in the server application with the LI and it directly connects with the Automation Engine Server. It's amazing.

The initial setup required us to do an analysis of the Dollar U environment for conversion to ONE Automation. We have special tools for converting the session and the UPROCs from Dollar U to jobs and workflow in ONE Automation. We have developed macros with VBA to convert all the information in Dollar U to ONE Automation.

When we start an integration for the first time, we create the client and we attach the agent for the application, because every application is a "client" for us. We use Red Hat Servers for this. Of course, we use Windows servers, but 80 percent are Red Hat as well as iX and HPE servers.

Each application takes a different amount of time. For example, there are applications for factoring or financial applications. We need one year for their implementation. Smaller applications take a few months. We start with the small applications and then move to the more difficult applications. We have a team working on this and every person has ten or 15 applications to do.

You should know configuration and scripting in Shell because Automic only gives binary, which you can adapt for your environment. You can the Automic with PostgreSQL, but it's not good. I prefer to use it with Oracle Database and to use clusters to create a solid environment.

I have installed many packages, such as for WebSphere, for chat bots, for SSH, and for using programs like Excel, and Word. I'm trying to learn many things about development with ONE Automation.

It's a good tool, really strong. It needs some new features, it needs to evolve, but it's really good. I really like it. And now, with Broadcom in the picture, it's a strong company.

The primary use case for using Workload Automation is the automation of applications in different cases for business or data warehouses, controlling programs, and ERP systems (like SAP). We have also began to use it for data center automation for provisioning of virtual infrastructure.

One of the benefits is we have one view of our automated things. We do not have different automated silos. We have one view for our operators, which are doing things 24/7, and need just one interface, not multiple ones.

The main features are the enormous, stripped function, which the software provides. Also, its many different agents which are supported in different platforms. 

After the merger, it is getting more American. Now, they do not have support in French and have limited German documentation. This is a critical problem for companies who have older generations who did not have English in school.

The big pain points are the AWI and the web interface. There needs to be a change with these features.

I am a long-time customer of the solution. The older versions were very stable. Then, there was a switch to versions eight and version nine. This was a few years ago. 

I am happy that Automic understands the needs of their customers and changed their development process, because now, the application is very stable.

It is very scalable. We have in one environment one and a half to two million executions a day. We are one of their bigger customers.

There used to be custom support from Germany, which was one of the biggest features. There was a change. It was German speaking support. That was one of the things, which I am sorry to say is getting worse. They have different support centers now, and the support is worse, not better.

I understand why there was a change. There were different mergers with other companies. There were more products, like the release automation or service orchestration. There are many platforms which are supported. It is very hard for the support to support the whole thing.

When we build a new environment, I am involved. Workload Automation environment setup is smooth, but it could be smoother.

One thing which is not so smooth is CA Release Automation. When doing a PoC of CA Release Automation, and it is not so smooth to install because of the different communications between these components.

Every time there is a task which must be repeated, the solution can reduce costs. When you do it one time manually, or when you do it perhaps two times manually, it is okay. If you have to do it more than this, because of the automation, you can reduce costs.

Possibly IBM, because we are a big IBM customer.

You should have a look at Automic, but also at their competition. There are a few things which they need to change. I would not have said this a few years ago, but now they need to improve.

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.

We have many use cases for automating different systems. In most cases, we use it to automate database application servers. We have over 2000 servers, so we need to synchronize jobs on various platforms, which is our most common use case.

So far, the performance has been okay.

Our environment is more stable. We have less downtime and some of our operations are much faster than they were before. We have seen a positive impact on efficiency. Tasks that used to take people one or two hours are now done in minutes.

In terms of whether using Automic has enabled our company to grow, it is possible. However, I have not been made aware of any examples.

The most valuable feature is that I do not have to wait for one job to finish, then manually click on the next one to start. Automation is the best feature.

My biggest complaint is that there is no list price. We work with Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, etc., and all of them have list pricing. Automic, right up until today, has never had list pricing. This makes things difficult, because we need to plan budgets for the next year and can't. The lack of list pricing is my number one complaint because it is very difficult to plan anything.

We have some systems where, every time we lose the network connection, the software, after five or 10 minutes, is inoperable. With Automic, we monitor what is happening, and if network connectivity is down, Automic deletes all the logs that caused the system to crash. Before Automic, we needed to handle these situations manually. Now, every time that logs crowd the system, Automic deletes them and solves the problem.

That means we do not have this type of downtime anymore. It is system crucial for us.

Scalability is fine. We have a cluster and two active-active nodes, so it is very easy to scale.

We used technical support in the beginning. The experience was very good. They were easy to reach and know their business. They helped us a lot during that time.

This is our first job management solution. My managers made the decision to buy it.

The important criteria when selecting a vendor to work with are

• Good support
• A good product.

Good support is very important for us.

The initial setup was straightforward. The installation took two days. We did not have any difficulties. You just click, click, and click.

As an engineer, I do not have access to this information regarding ROI.

The cost of arrays is high. If you want to buy an array for an application, and see value from it, you need about half a million dollars. That is too expensive.

Read the documentation.

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.

Monitoring Oracle jobs.

Performance is great.

It's huge because I was a user in a subdivision that got bought or came into the single instance of Emerson. We brought, at the time, UC4 with us. We saw it was a value even for Emerson as a whole to have it.

Being able to script, create something I want the software to do for a specific job. This allows me to do that. Very powerful.

It's a scheduling tool on steroids. We can have a job run at certain times. If it fails, reset it a number of times and then send an e-mail. Send e-mails on any type of event. Calendar creation, schedule things on certain days, year-end stuff, period end. It's endless, really.

I don't know if they have it now, but a mobile version would be good so instead of logging in on my laptop to see something, I could just go in through an app and see if a certain job is running or not. That would be pretty slick.

Stability is good. We just upgraded, so there are a few things we're working on, but otherwise it's pretty stable.

The scalability is good. We've got more than Oracle jobs, we've got Windows and SQL Servers so we can do quite a bit.

They're responsive, because we've had the tech people on the phone during upgrades. They've also been teaching us, because we're learning the new version, so I guess I could say I've worked with them. They are very knowledgeable.

The older version wasn't performing as well because we pretty much maxed out what it could handle with our thousands of jobs we run a day. So, the Automation solution was brought to us and we said, "Well, this thing could supposedly handle it," so we've gone to it, and so far so good.

I'd say complex from the side that I don't know, where they have to set up, from our operations group, the servers and all that. That's beyond me.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor, I would say, are

• tech support
• the knowledgability
• their track record with other users 
• the size of the users too, to see where we compare with them.

Go for it. I love it because I can move around in it and I'm very comfortable with the software. So I'm not scared of it, you could say.

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.