AutoSys Workload Automation Reviews

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.

The valuable features are stability, ease of use, and the use of scheduling. Our company processes approximately 200,000 jobs a day through this product. The product is very stable and stays up.

The solution helps us meet our SLAs. It helps us keep the product data flowing and the jobs running without down time.

There is always something that can be improved, but I do like this product. It is a good product. The DevOps are there to move the tool into the future. The new path is mainframe modernization. That's where we'll be headed with this product.

In terms of stability, it’s pretty much always up. The solution stays running. We do have our company-wide scheduled outages, but that's the only time it comes down at this point. We are working towards a better solution for constantly being up and CA is working with us on that. We just converted to version 12, and that's a step in the direction of keeping the solution up.

The solution is scalable. They are creating products to help us use GUI interfaces. They are helping us to monitor the system better and keep it going.

I have used technical support, and I would rate them at 10/10. I love the guys there. I know them and they know me. They're very easy to work with. I can speak for this product and say that they know their product and they're there to answer our questions when we need them. If we have an issue, they are there.

I can’t speak much for the initial setup. I just upgraded to version 12 and it was spot on. They had the procedures and jobs in place and I just created my own procedures for my environment. I had no issues.

We have a saying at work, "If there is an issue, CA 7 is the victim, not the cause." This tool is a pretty stable product.

When choosing a vendor, I look for customer service. I want them to be there when I need them. I'm not going to say that they have to have a big name, but I guess cost is a factor as well. Cost is always important. I think cost and customer service are the best things. Those are the most important factors. I need someone to be there when I have an issue, and I need personal assistance to stay up and running.

The flexibility of being able to schedule the timing and frequency of different automation scripts makes it easier for us to meet our customers’ business requirements.

We use the WCC, which is an interface that sits on top of the application. That is pretty user friendly in terms of being able to see the status of job flows, job failures; and in the ability to manually intervene and fix issues. Essentially, the code you're running sends a return code, which you can configure to be read as a success or failure.

We're in healthcare. We need a way to automate loading the members and processing claims. Without a tool, we wouldn't be able to do that efficiently. It increased efficiency.

The most important thing is that duration is not displayed in the actual WCC GUI. I know they have some different add-on tools where you can get that information; but it would be nice to be able to see how long jobs ran, and the history for more than ten days. As is, the scheduler already starts to have performance issues when you keep the ten day history. So there are efficiency issues related to being able to keep more logs.

There are always issues with software. They have some improvements they can make. The way they're heading, I think they're on the right track.

Stability has been good since we took release 11.36. Before that, we had release 11.35. That was somewhat stable. We had growing pains because we switched over from a different scheduling tool.

It has been easily scalable. CA helped us build the Workload Automation infrastructure that we knew we were going to grow into. It was really a partnership between the two of us to make sure we were scaled correctly. We do about 10,000 jobs a week, a couple hundred thousand a month.

Early in my career, I was more on the technical side. Now that I've transitioned to management, I step in at times to help with it, but not as much.

The few times that I get involved, it's usually bad because it's an escalated incident of some sort. I think primarily my team's happy with the support they get from the resources that have been engaged; and works with them through the issues.

We were using Tidal Enterprise Scheduler. We switched over, and then had some growing pains during the transition.

My team owns setting it up, configuring it, supporting it, and all of those things.
The first time we set it up, it was a little overwhelming because it's something different and new. I had a newer resource on it, and there was a time constraint for getting it installed. We had somebody from CA handhold us through the process.

A couple of our customers use Control M, so we considered that as well, from what I understand.

Do your homework, and be ready for a challenge. Anytime you switch tools, it's going to be a challenge.

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.

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.

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.