AutoSys Workload Automation Reviews

I think the speed of it, the consistency of it and that it stays up all the time. We've not had any problems with it in the last year. We upgraded to the last version and I'm here taking a look at the newest version that they've released, 1136. We're on 35. It's promised to be a better product, it's much faster and just as reliable. They also have a great web interface that we haven't deployed yet.

We've had bad systems from other organizations that we've adopted or bought. Workload Automation used to be called AutoSys, and it is actually a better scheduler in my opinion because of the way it schedules. With a base on dependency, events and job triggers. It works on events and triggers. Some of them automatically create jobs and they reschedule them.

AutoSys has it a little differently and it's quite easy to use. It's very easy to set up and it just launches a script anywhere that we have a local agent installed on a server. It goes throughout the world in different locations.

It also works based in Houston, at one of our data centers. We also have some people overseas and we use it abroad. It's a worldwide application that runs over 160,000 jobs throughout our enterprise.

I see room for improvement, as far as monitoring the system and having a quiet data center, when you don't have to have people monitoring and watching jobs run or watching flows going and looking for something to stop or a job to fail. I want to be alerted when we have a problem. I don't want to sit and watch a screen or have a staff of people sitting around the world waiting for something to fail. By having a so-called quiet or lights out system, where we get alerted just on these exceptions. That's the direction I'd like to see the product take. You spend a lot of quality time and money on people watching simple things happen. Lights go green, lights go red or lights go yellow. If we only saw something when they went red, those are the kind of alarms and notations I'd like to have to give to a staff of people that can handle those issues and get it restarted.

9 years.

The problem has not been with workload, we do have some server outages. Also maintenance times of other products. Workload Automation is dynamic enough to put jobs in pending or put servers offline, until we get ready to bring them on. As soon as they go back online, the server's jobs start rescheduling themselves again. It's a dynamic product, it's been stable and we've never had a real outage with the product.

We have it right now operating in something called dual server mode. If we lose one end of it or one processor, the other side takes over and it picks up from where it left off. It's an always up situation. If we have to throw it back to the primary then we take it down, do an amendments window, do a quick switch over to the primary and let it keep operating.

We never really miss a beat.

As I said, we have agents, our servers, in other locations in different cities and in different countries. We are able to contact with those, schedule batch runs on those and bring the results back to Houston as far as the successes or the failures of those processes.

Technical support from CA has been very good actually. We don't need them very often unless we have a problem with some integration such as a 64-bit application and something that's foreign we're putting on a server, such as BusinessObjects or Oracle, something we haven't seen before. We'll call them for some support. Otherwise our staff is pretty knowledgeable enough and we've had CA products for about 9 years. We're pretty familiar with it on site. It's just when some of the newer products come in, integrating with those, those are the times we've had to call CA support.

As far as the product itself, just learning about some of the new features, we'll speak with their support personnel to find out they operate or how they can implement it with our staff. Once they come on site and given us some information, how-to's, then we pick it up for ourselves. We don't need support as often as we used to with the prior products.

The initial setup, what we had, was called 35 then we went to a 45 version. Now we went from the 45 to what's called R11, that was a nightmare. R11 was a pretty difficult implementation for us. A lot of things changed between the two versions. After we got over those humps, CA put out another service pack and that relieved most of our problems. I think a lot of the rest of the industry suffered some of the same issues that we had.

They were able to quickly release those within 6 or 7 months.

I would give AutoSys a 10/10. Best practices are to plan your workflow. Try to plan where you have as less intervention as you can possibly use. Use the product and the triggers, the timing base events, use the calendars and try to make it flow as smooth as possible. Don't put something that's troublesome into your production environment. Work it out in tests and UAT or development. Even try it in your sandbox if necessary but don't bring it to production.

When it comes to production, if it doesn't work, send it back. You don't want these problems in production. At the shop I work with, we have a 99.91% success rate. When we don't have that, we go through and examine the jobs that fail. If they failed then we have a problem, we examine and get them fixed.

Important buying criteria: reputation, longevity, how is their product and other people's opinions of the product as well. After we've test driven a product, we usually bring something in-house, drive it and see how we like it. If we have use for it, we have enough people that would take a buy in on it, find it's useful, we find it's dependable then we probably want to set something like that in as a candidate. We need to have something that's proven.

The most valuable feature for us is security. We now have extra job types, so instead of three, we have 55. We use the database plugin and, instead of running a job through OCO, we can run it through WCC. The SQL is right there on the spot.

We're able to find jobs and seeing how everything looks. We just upgraded from 4.5 to 11.3. It is a lot more powerful and a lot more secure. The security features are top notch. Anyone within the company could get in and do whatever they wanted if they had access to 4.5, but with 11.3 we can put them in an AD group and then assign security based on the AD group, so it's great.

We found some things in our system where there were unnecessary delays, so we were able to take those out. It saved our batch and saved us some time running our batch at night.

The job flow could use a little more improvement. When we had 4.5, one of the things we were able to where a job was and where the flow was as your batch was running. With 11.3, it's a little more difficult. The jobs are not necessarily in the order that they're running and it's difficult to follow that way.

Also, they could improve the GUI. I would like to see just a better job flow where they could instead of showing jobs in the queue order, showing them in the order that they actually run in so you can follow it top to bottom. This seems to me to be more logical.

We've had no issues with deployment since the complex upgrade.

It's been stable.

It meets our scalability needs.

We have a part-time consultant who used to work for CA and he knows a lot of people, so he's actually pretty good at getting technical support whenever it needs it.

It was pretty complex going from 4.5 to 11.3.6. Just the migrating and all the security settings and all the changes in the job types and having to set up the pages on different servers made the upgrade complex.

Although there were some doubts during our upgrade, I think this turned out to be the best product, as long as you're prepared and have your servers ready to go.

Enterprise job scheduling.

We have worked with CA to better understand all of the security points, the ability to lock the product down so that it's not being abused or exploited in any fashion.

• Flexibility
• Ease of use
• The capabilities of the product to schedule on multiple platforms, multiple operating systems.

Also, over time the CA workload agent has gotten much better. For our organization it's important for us to communicate in a secure fashion between the host and the other platforms, and we are able to do that with our CA product, with ESP.

I would rate it a nine out of 10.

Scalability is a 10 out of 10.

We've completely turned over our scheduling area, and a lot of questions go to CA support. The people in the CA support for ESP have been there for a long time. I know some of them from the time when they worked for Cybermation, and they are very good. I trust their answers.

Tech support is a 10 out of 10.

Back in 2006, we were using CA-7 and we were looking for a product that would do better for scheduling off-platform. We found ESP, which was at that time owned by Cybermation, and we completed migration from CA-7 to ESP, and then shortly after that CA bought ESP. It had to do with scheduling on the distributed platform.

CA-7 was expensive and didn't do distributive work load very well. It was not that flexible. It didn't do everything we needed it to do.

We had Professional Services help us, and it wasn't really that difficult.

We did have onsite training and migration services and we paid for them. It wasn't hard to understand for our people.

I don't really get involved in that part of it. The one thing I would say is that people need to pay attention to how they use their ESP agents on the distributed platform. That's where some of the cost comes in, based on how many you need or how many you use.

At that time CA owned three schedulers and CA-7 was the one we were using. The other two did not necessarily apply to our environment. And there weren't too many others out there. I think we might still have taken a cheap route. We might not of actively compared with other products that were on the market at the time, other than comparing it to CA, and we thought we were getting a good deal.

I believe CA had been actively developing it, enhancing it, and attempting to make it easier to use. I think it's been a good product for us, and I think others would find that to be true as well.

We use it to run different jobs across different servers.

The initial setup is easy.

It's a stable product.

The solution can scale. 

There should be easier migrations from a different bus scheduler. Prior to this workload, we were using BMC control M and the migration was really hard. We had to manually create the jobs and there was no sort of automation for the migration. Workload Automation could improve the handling of file transfer jobs. Compared to control M, control M allows multiple file transfers. It can have five types of files that can be transferred. They have different file formats or different sizes. You can configure it in control M. Here, you only have one and three for file transfer. A lot of times you also encounter issues with SSL crypto in conflict on certain jobs. Basically, the newer servers have newer security measures and currently, the product is not compatible with them.

I've used the solution for seven years. 

The solution is stable. there are no bugs or glitches. It does not crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

We had a few issues, however, the issues were more on the infrastructure rather than with the application itself.

We have 60 people using the solution.

It's scalable. It can expand as needed. 

We've used technical support. We find them very helpful and responsive and are satisfied with the level of service we get.

Positive

I find it simple to set up. However, the fear really is understanding how Workload Automation handles jobs as compared to control M. They have similarities, however, they handle schedules and jobs differently.

At the moment, we have a team of two or three handling the support for the product.

We handled the implementation ourselves, although we did request an overview of the installation and setup process. 

If you looked at the client price, I'd rate the cost five out of five.I heard from recent talks with support that they removed the licensing scheme that we had before. Maybe the rating would be lower now. Before they had this unlimited installation of agents across and service. They've since removed that scheme.

We did not evaluate other solutions. It was the client's position to use this product as they were offered a good deal. At that time, we were using control M and I was initially hesitant due to the challenges I saw in terms of how the product handles the jobs. The client already decided on the solution and we just had to learn to love it. 

We're using the solution at the request of a client. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

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.

CA 7 Edition supplies our mainframe scheduling workflow. Automation.

It's performed well over the years. Obviously we've had CA 7 Edition for decades. It just performs its job day in, day out. Very little of having to remediate any issues with 7. Obviously there are issues with jobs eventually, but those are always developer issues, with how they've coded their JCL. But, otherwise it performs well and executes as scheduled.

• Dependability
• Delivering on the execution of the jobs
• Zero downtime 

All the above are definitely important.

Day to day it actually allows the developers to execute their critical processes for the business, running the business. I can see that expanding in the future.

It's hard to tell what needs to be improved. That's kind of why I'm here at the CA World conference, to see what options are out there that may help our developers fulfill their needs in the future. I'm trying to get a feel for what other tool sets may be available to help them do their jobs better.

I can see the analysis piece and the web client being critical parts, going into the future. Especially with the aging population, the baby boomers going out. We're very top heavy at this point within the company. As those people age out and retire, they're taking a lot of business knowledge with them. 

Stability is very good. Like I said before, very little remediation needed, close to zero. We probably have two or three tickets with CA in a year.

Obviously, scalability is dependent on the mainframe MIPS. If you need more to run the jobs, once it's running jobs, it's out of CA 7's control. We haven't any performance issues, any time recently, of it not being able to get jobs into the cues.

Customer service with CA 7 has been very good. They've helped us through several upgrades, with tickets around those. Whenever we've had issues, they've been able to point out where to look to see what potentially is affecting 7 itself.

For us, when considering vendors, a lot of it's going to depend on their 

• roadmap
• ability to service and respond to customers needs
• long term durability, are they going to be there a year from now, two years from now, 20 years from now? 

Vendors go out of business. You don't want to be in a situation where you're forced into doing a product migration to something else.

Make sure you know what the requirements of your business are, and whether it's going to meet the needs of those that are going to be using and depending on the product.

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.

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.