AutoSys Workload Automation Reviews

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.

AutoSys Workload Automation can be deployed on the cloud and on-premise. We have some file storage in the cloud.

AutoSys Workload Automation could improve the integration.

I have been using AutoSys Workload Automation for five years.

The stability of AutoSys Workload Automation is good.

AutoSys Workload Automation is scalable.

I have used the support from AutoSys Workload Automation and my experience was good.

We previously used our own similar solution prior to using AutoSys Workload Automation.

The initial setup of AutoSys Workload Automation was straightforward. Based on the feature requirements for the use case we deployed the solution.

We used a consultant for the deployment of the solution.

There is an annual license to use AutoSys Workload Automation.

I rate the price of AutoSys Workload Automation a four out of five.

I recommend this solution to others.

I rate AutoSys Workload Automation an eight out of ten.

We primarily use CA Workload Automation AE for batch management processing throughout the organization.

The tool provides added flexibility for our customers while maintaining our required control points. 

The web UI is beneficial and the granular security policies allow us to cover all of our audit requirements. 

Performance improvements in the UI would be appreciated. It lacks support and integration with cloud computing platforms.

It streamlines processing really well, so we're able to cut down on our processing times.

Ease of use.

I honestly don't know I can't think of anything to improve.

Stability is rock solid. We haven't had any major issues with it, not even minor issues. It's been good.

We use technical support all the time. We would be lost without them. They're fantastic. Really good job. We're able to reach the right person to help us out right away. 

I've done multiple products. I've been significantly involved in setup. It's very straightforward. Easy installation. Just follow the steps that installation requires and that's it.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor are a good reputation and good technical support.

I would suggest researching CA. It's good.

In our use, I really enjoy things being in one spot. It's extremely easy to use. It's easy to set up. It's easy to upgrade.

Most of the time, it's easy to teach people how to use it. My developers a lot of the times get in there really quickly and they're all able to make an impact quickly.

There are a lot of benefits. Automating things is the future. You get to be efficient.

I'm in retail, so a lot of times, we do a lot of different jobs. You have one person doing what three people normally do. The only way you can really function is if you automate things.

It's beautiful because I can schedule things in a hundred different ways. There's generally always a solution to things with some sort of scheduling.

There has been preaching about cross-application critical pathing. It's extremely difficult for us to tell what is impacting what other items. I would absolutely love to be able to click one job and see all of its dependencies, regardless of which application that it's in, through externals. I've had a hard time getting traction on that. It was supposed to be in the most recent release, but got pulled in favor, I believe, of the web GUI. I would absolutely love to see cross-application critical pathing.

There are a couple things that they could do to make my life a little easier. Analytics seems to be a problem, so a couple of stars deducted for that, but it's probably one of the easiest tools that I manage.

It's pretty stable. In the eight years I've been doing this, I've had three major outages. One of them was self-inflicted. One of them, I'm not really sure what happened. The other one was, the database ran out of resources.

We're expected be up all the time, 24/7/365. I'm always available. Really the only time I've had outages were some sort of hardware failure. The product itself has always been very, very stable, and extremely easy to upgrade. We've been able to keep it up-to-date and make sure that we're able to take care of it.

One specific thing is, we've all moved to Oracle Exadata. I am probably one of the few systems that handles all of the database node rolling really, really well. It freezes for a couple of seconds, and then it comes right back. Every time they're like, "We're doing maintenance. We have to shut down nodes." I'm like, "That's fine; we're good. You don't even have to tell me about it. It will take care of it."

The system is very, very stable and reliable.

Scalability just depends; it depends on how much you want to spend.

The beauty of some of the product is that they license by agent. Our ETL agent runs thousands of jobs on one server, so we don't have to pay per job. Generally, when they need to put in a hundred new ETL jobs, it's no big deal. We put it in, it runs, everything runs well and does what it's supposed to do.

Generally, with first-level support, I tend to know more than they do, so it's a little bit painful. We've had some challenges with it.

At this point, when I have major problems, I've just started calling my product managers to get help with it. I guess a positive is that I don't have to call technical support very often because it's stable and it works.

I was not involved with the original setup.

I have done an entire migration and upgrade of the newer one. We started out with 11.1. That was already in place when I joined the team.

The 11.3 upgrades and everything after that, I have done. I have to say, it is probably one of the easiest tools that I have to upgrade, especially once they moved to 12.0 and they started doing in-place upgrades.

The last time when we did the migration, we got our Linux Gold Standard. This time around, all I had to do was push a couple buttons and my entire outage was 24 minutes.

Do your homework. Talk to other workload automation people. Get their feel for it and find out what has worked for them and hasn't worked for them.

I had to learn things the hard way. I now have this amazing network of workload automation people. They're engaged and they want to help you. Talk to them and make everything a little bit easier on yourself.

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 ease of using the scheduling feature of CA Workload Automation ESP Edition for Mainframe is valuable to us. Also, being able to configure dependencies and trigger file related processing is a big thing for us. We're starting to get into some of the DB2 plugins as well. We just keep adding functions and learning more.

It has streamlined our scheduling and cut down our overall run time; not in half, but significantly. It's really been great.

We Received a 'Not active. "Scan Failed"; "The 'path/file' does not exist or not a directory" error message/email on one of our event level file triggers. Both clusters were down due to maintenance resulting in this error message. In order to make this active, we had to manually suspend and resume the event. We are requesting an automated process where no manual intervention is needed to make those event level FT's active again and/or preventing that error.
I’d like to have the ability to restart a failed file scan on the mainframe.

Stability has been very good.

Technical support has been great. They've always helped out. Even if it took a couple weeks or a month, they've always come back with a solution.

Our company was using a mainframe scheduler that didn't connect to the distributed systems. We were porting to Windows and we needed a job scheduler that was Windows compatible. I'm not sure what other tools management looked at, but I know this was the best solution.

When working with a vendor, I evaluate their helpfulness and the quality of their technical support. Also important is the ease of contacting them and getting an answer back.

For initial setup, we had a CA team there for several weeks ahead of time. Anything is a little complex when you're going from a tool you've been using to a brand new tool. We learned a lot from them, but once we reached a few months out after the initial setup, we learned much more. There was a steep learning curve. But, it's been a great product. It's better than the previous product. Our needs were expanding, so it was where we needed to go. It has been great.

Give it a try and call me if you need. I'm open to questions and helping. It's been a great workload automation tool for us.

Primary use is job scheduling. It performs admirably. It really does what it is supposed to do. I have been doing this for 19 years with AutoSys.

We have ended up using it as a Tier 1 application supporting other Tier 1 applications. We schedule all jobs, everything from payroll to how to move oil around the country.

• Reliability
• Stability
• Expandability: It scales well.

A lot of what we want is going to be based on our particular solution, not for something everybody else could use at the same time. Different companies use AutoSys differently. They have different standards and different methodologies. A solution that we want in place would not apply to other companies.

From what we heard, the features we want are being included with the next couple of releases. One is to be able to work and create automatic ticketing solutions that are not necessarily CA products. It is just the automation around getting jobs to work correctly. If something fails, what do we do then.

I would like to be able to see the product grow into something that is going to be more reliable and better. The new purchase of Automic should help.

It is very reliable. There is always been a bump here there, but it really does well for us.

It scales very well. We can add jobs and remove jobs. We do not have problems maintaining the product across multiple environments and multiple servers.

The initial contact is not very reliable. We have to escalate through channels to get to somebody who knows what's going on. It takes time that we do not necessarily have. It is because its that the support tech is not dedicated to the product and they do not know how to fix our exact issue.

We have waited years for a problem to be resolved. The tickets get closed with no resolution, and there should be a resolution but we can't get a reliable answer. We run out of patience and just close the tickets.

We take advantage of the CA Community, however it is hit and miss. There are a lot of good questions and answers, but also a lot of simple ones, where people just look at them and go, "Just read the manual. It's in there."

It was both straightforward and complex. The information gathering to get the product installed takes time and effort. Once we had everything gathered, the installs went very smoothly and quickly.

The complexity of the product has to do with the information gathering:

• What it has to do? 
• Where it has to do it? 
• How it has to interface? 
• What databases are we connecting to and to what IDs? 
• What servers are we logging into? 
• What IDs do we have to use? 
• How are the parts connecting? 
• Are there ports that need to be opened? 
• Are there firewalls that need to be adjusted? 
• Are there various things that we have to account for that we were not initially thinking about? 

The documentation covers these, but it is just a matter of gathering all of them. The information gathering can take a week. The product install takes minutes.

The actual decision to install AutoSys was out of my hands, but it was recommended. It is one of the better products on the market.

Use this product. I have used the competitors' products. I have used AutoSys. If there is a comparison, I will give them my views as to what I think of all the products. My view right now, use AutoSys.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Service
• Reliability
• Support
• If we are able to actually contact our sales reps and get solutions and answers from them. 
• If we are able to open tickets and get answers to some of the easier questions.
• Are they willing to come in and sit with us, and make sure we are getting things done correctly the first time.