AutoSys Workload Automation Reviews

We use AutoSys to run our scheduled jobs. In terms of the version, I am probably using version 14.

This type of tool is essential for a data group in terms of how we pick up data from different things and vendors, and how we set up the workflows to do all the jobs. Without it, we can't imagine how we would run all the jobs. If we need something to run on a daily basis, we can use AutoSys to fully automate it. We don't need to have a dedicated resource to look at a job and ensure that it is completed. AutoSys simplifies our life.

It is very valuable for us when we are trying to arrange or orchestrate jobs into a system. It is helpful for triggering jobs for a scheduled task.

We are trying to see if we can use this from a cloud perspective with AWS, Azure, and other clouds, but it seems that there is no cloud integration in this product. We would like to see cloud integration. We are very pleased with this solution, but we are moving our application to the cloud, and we found out that it doesn't support any cloud features. So, we are trying to find a replacement.

I've been using this solution for more than 10 years.

It is quite mature. It is pretty good.

We are using AutoSys for very large-scale deployment, and it is very scalable. It is capable of handling 10,000 jobs on a daily basis. It is very good.

We have more than a hundred users, and it is being used at the corporate level. We are trying to use something like this in the cloud. I don't think we are going to expand the usage of AutoSys because we are thinking of moving to the cloud. We are trying to see which solutions provide similar functionality but support the cloud environment.

Their support is very standardized. The application has been out there for quite a long time, and the skillset is generally available in the market.

It is a very mature product, and we require very little support. I don't remember ever contacting their customer support or client support team for any major issues or downtimes.

I have been using this solution from day one in this organization.

It depends on the experience. For me, it is very straightforward. In a simple setup, you set up a server, a database, and an agent, and you are ready to go. In a complicated setup, you have to set up high availability, virtual machines clusters, etc.

We have a dedicated group to handle all top-level applications. This is relatively straightforward for them. From planning to implementation and getting it into the production environment, it takes a month or two.

We did it ourselves. To get it rolling and to maintain it, we have a very small team with less than five people. They are just regular developers.

This product has been bought by Broadcom, and Broadcom does not have enough dedicated resources to further develop this product. I don't see any major features, versions, or functions being added to this product in the future. I don't think the vendors would be willing to spend resources on top of it.

I would rate it a nine out of 10. We really like the product and its functions. It works, and we like its stability, scalability, and robustness. It is a very reliable product, but it lacks future enhancements. We haven't heard of any cloud initiative for this product.

We needed to replace Allen Systems Zeke/Zebb back in 2000, since the product was not being updated anymore. ESP met our needs.

It gives us flexibility when doing releases. We can make changes for one day in a PDS member, since we stage our jobs by date, and the next day the normal job definitions are run.

Flexibility of scheduling jobs in PDS members, and not a database, gives you so many more options. ESP is a solid product and works extremely well, it's very reliable. Enhancements are always being added with new features.

You can add jobs/applications/agents in ESP very quickly; it just takes minutes to do.

The GUI/Workstation is weak and needs to be improved. CA is working on this right now; the web based GUI is in beta mode at this time.

ESP is rock solid. It is as reliable as it gets.

No issues with scalability.

Technical support, when it was Cybermation, was much more solid. Now that it's CA, at times the support is excellent and other times it’s not as good.

Allen Systems Zeke/Zebb had issues, and was being sold to different companies at the time. The product did not move forward.

We had Cybermation come in-house to work with us, in doing the conversion back in 2001. It took about one year to convert all of our systems.

CA pricing has been a problem, and not looked upon favorably here at all.

BMC Control-M, IBM TWS.

CA ESP is a solid product and very easy to use. It allows you to be very creative in what you do. It is well liked here and is very easy to learn. The customized views that each individual can create, and ones that can be made free-form, makes this very popular with the programmers.

It provides us with reliable scheduling of various business workloads. There are various service-level agreements, such as payroll, that need to be met at a certain period of time and if they're not met, there's going to be trouble. The reporting facility of the product helps me to identify problematic jobs in the environment.

The reliability issues need to be resolved. We have some patches that need to be applied and that's our next step to trying to get this thing resolved. In particular, one of the issues is licensing, so that could become a real problem for you if you're in a very large environment. It could get very costly if you want to scale this product out. It will scale, technically, but licensing may prevent that from happening.

I'd also like better reporting and a better UI.

It has issues and is not entirely stable. For example, the graphical interface is not 24/7 for us.

Just 8-10 people are using it as we're not a big shop.

I have some of the other team members handle technical issues as it takes a lot of time to diagnose stuff. If I can't get past an issue, I turn it over to one of the other guys and let them work on it. But, no, I have not dealt with CA in their support infrastructure.

I was not involved in the setup. I'm relatively new with the company, but have a lot of experience with scheduling.

For the most part it compares similarly to IBM and they each have their pluses and minuses. They both scale out and they're both found in very large environments.

One piece of advice I can give is training. You need to have some sort of a background in this in order to use this product effectively. If you're not trained up, you're not going to be successful with it.

The most valuable feature is the ease of coding up schedules to run jobs in both the mainframe and distributed environments.

Prior to installing ESP, we had to use two products: one for mainframe and one for distributed.

It allowed us to consolidate our monitoring down to one particular console in one particular environment.

We need the ability to be able to have Windows user passwords changed periodically and automatically.

I have used it for 6 and 1/2 years.

When we first installed ESP, we had a few issues with the ability of jobs to have their status reported across sysplexes.

We have not encountered any issues with scalability.

Technical support is 7 out of 10, with 10 being exceptional.

We previously had Maestro for scheduling the distributed environment and CA7 for scheduling the mainframe environment.

The setup was not too terribly complex, but it did take some time to learn all the complexities of the product.

Well, the product is part of our ELA with CA, but we do have a specific number of licenses we can use for the distributed agents we deploy, so you have to be careful as to what limit you set for number of agents, so you have room to grow in your environment.

Before choosing this product, we also evaluated BMC Control-M.

Take the time to learn how to use the GUI and learn how to code the schedules. There are a lot of different ways to code schedules.

I work as an engineer in an enterprise company. We have used AutoSys Workload Automation for a long time for batch processing and other automation things.

AutoSys Workload Automation has saved us a lot of time for batch processing and bad jobs. Earlier, if someone had an issue with the application, they would open a ticket, and we would take the ticket and work on the issue. AutoSys Workload Automation can pick up a ticket raised by someone, resolve the issue, and close the ticket. So, it saves a lot of human intervention.

The most valuable feature of AutoSys Workload Automation is batch processing.

There is a recently made change in AutoSys Workload Automation's subscription model. The solution does not have a friendly subscription model because it forces users to take a five-year subscription simultaneously, charging millions of dollars. Hence, our managers are looking for alternatives to AutoSys Workload Automation.

I have been using AutoSys Workload Automation for five years.

I rate AutoSys Workload Automation ten out of ten for stability.

I rate AutoSys Workload Automation ten out of ten for scalability.

Overall, I rate AutoSys Workload Automation ten out of ten.

The most valuable features are helping to schedule jobs and helping to watch for data set triggers.

A benefit of the solution is scheduling multiple jobs. We run 5,000 jobs a day, so it helps us to keep all of that in order; keep all the dependencies, everything, flowing in the right direction; any kind of events, getting all those alerts and anything that could help with making things faster; not keeping anything behind.

• Maybe just new ways to schedule things
• Maybe a little bit more options for scheduling
• More keywords

Things like that. That would help.

It's very reliable. I haven't had a lot of problems with it; working through the schedule; making changes; simulating; making things work.

We've had a couple problems and we've written in to them or called in to them, and they have been very responsive, helping us solve the problems. It might take a day or two, or a week, but they're always very helpful.

Recently, we had a problem with our WOBTRIGs failing because the servers and different things were having updates to them, and it would be pulled away from workload automation.

Kiki actually helped us to put some more information in to restart the WOBTRIGs more than just once and that was all we were doing. Since we've put that into our product, we have not had any more abends with this.

We knew it was time to invest in a new solution because we were having multiple abends every day. We were having like 5-10 abends every day, and we would have to restart them continuously. We talked to CA support, and they were telling us that that's not right and that we needed to add some new parameters to help with this process. We thought it was something on our side, and we did check with our guys on our floors with the different windows, the different agents. It turned out it was just something that could be fixed in ESP.

Anything new is a little bit complex. It's a great tool, now that I've learned it; just at first, just the learning curve of learning the tool; doing some things wrong, but it is a great tool and it has helped us; a lot better than our previous scheduler.

The management went out and looked at different tools and brought them in, and we looked at different things because we were wanting to run across multiple platforms. TWS couldn't do that. It was mainly a mainframe and when we were really branching out to the different distributed platforms, we needed a tool that would cover all of them and ESP was that.

My advice to others depends on what they're looking for, too, in a tool. If they need something like we did to go across multiple platforms, I think it's great, but I have nothing to compare it to except TWS. But I think this is a great tool, and I think it solves the problem for us anyway. It's a great tool.

It's a great tool. I really like working with it. Now that we've got it and had it, it's very easy to use. I think it's easy for other people to use, too, because we had to work a lot of kinks out at first. A lot of our stuff came straight from TWS over to CA, and we just did a transition of straight over. We didn't rework the whole schedule, so we did have to work out some problems with it just to begin with. Now that we've got things smoothed out, it's great.

We run millions of jobs through it every day using it for financial transactions, banking, credit cards, PeopleSoft, payroll, etc. We use it for everything.

It has just been in use in this organization for many years. It is just a standard go-to tool for scheduling.

It works.

I do not have any features that I need to see, but there is a lot of stuff coming out and the tools that attach to AutoSys. That will be very helpful in making it easier for our customers to view and see how their jobs are performing. 

It is very stable.

We are huge, so it is very scalable. We are probably one of their biggest customers.

The issues that we do have, they solve very quickly. Right now, we do not have any outstanding ones that I am aware of. Support from them has always been fantastic.

CA installation processes are never anything but complex.

It has been my go-to tool for 28 something years, and it has not failed me yet. There are all kinds of schools of thought as to what is the best scheduler to choose. I am an AutoSys proponent. I prefer AutoSys over the other ones out there for ease of use, ease of understanding, and getting people to understand how the tool works. Other schedulers do things differently than AutoSys. So, it really depends on what it is you need your scheduler to do in order for you to be able to choose which one to use.

What we really like is that it's an enterprise solution and it really allows us to do the "normal work," the different operating systems and platforms, but it also allows us to manage and control our ERP systems, and things like Informatica and Hadoop, and all those good things that are coming down the line, in the way of big data and things like that.

The really nice thing is that, as the business grows, we're not seeing the infrastructure grow. Regardless of how much new business we keep on, the team is pretty stable. We have a dedicated team of eight people. We maintain today nine instances of DE: three production and six pre-production. We're probably going to add a couple more in 2017, but we don't anticipate having to grow the infrastructure. We'll be able to keep serving the customers the same way we have historically and we'll be able to do that into the future, without seeing any degradation in service.

We would like to see good improvement on the historical reporting capabilities. It's always been, I think, a bit of a weak point. Currently, if you know a SQL programmer, he should become your best friend, but I'd like to see it get to the point where somebody with really basic skills – where they understand the information they want – can easily extract it. That's really the big area with room for improvement.

The development team has been really good about keeping up with not only our requests but the user community as a whole. We're pretty happy about it, but that's the one exception.

It's extremely stable. We put in the Canadian systems about three years ago, and we have not had an incident in the three years that has kept us down for more than a couple of hours.

Support has been really good. If we need to call somebody, generally they're on the line in a few minutes, and we get right into the diagnostics and we're set to go again. Extremely stable; the agents are perfect. They never give us a problem at all. The servers are getting awfully close.

It's our impression that we're probably one of the larger installations in the world. We have two instances controlling our Canada operation; it’s really Canada and the rest of the world. It was suggested that we spin up the second instance, but we really haven't seen a good reason for doing that, other than we keep some of the competing lines of business separated. Other than that, it seems to scale really well and we can keep going with it.

Tech support, as I’ve mentioned, has been great. I know that CA has kept some people in support for a very long time, so they're very comfortable with the product. They know how the thing works. They know if it ever makes a particular hiccup, what's exactly causing that. We actually are on the Platinum support program, so we have a dedicated support resource. Historically, that person has been outstanding. He's always just a phone call away. He's knowledgeable not only about the product but our environment. Based on that, he can do a really, really good job for us.

Before I came to my current job, I was actually an independent consultant. The last job I worked before I came to work here was converting all the material into the system. I've been there since day one. Initial setup has always been really, really straightforward. Architecturally, the solution make sense. There's a very good separation of functions and features. The security is outstanding and because the solution is English language-based, we don't really need to go out and put in a lot of infrastructure support to do the normal stuff. Basically, if you want a job to run on Tuesday, you simply tell it, run on Tuesday, and it miraculously works.

We were in a situation where we had one of everything and we really went out to do a consolidation in the solutions that we were using. We really saw the CA solution as something that would give us the reliability and the scalability to move us forward in the future. We really didn't see that from a lot of the other solutions in the industry, so we chose them.

When we are selecting a vendor, the support is really the first and foremost criteria, and then I guess support going forward, so, the development organization: How are they addressing changes in the industry, changes in the solution? That sort of thing.

Look really hard at what your requirements are today. Know that you're going to have a solution that you're going to be able to stick with for as long as you care to stick with it; also, something that can address audit requirements, address things like scalability, and usability. If you have to become an expert on how to make the product work and use it, then it's probably not as usable as you need it to be. Look for something that you can talk to, like you were talking to your little brother, and move forward from there.

The reasons for my rating are usability, reliability, and scalability of the solution.