AutoSys Workload Automation Reviews

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.

CA7 is very robust and one of CA's legacy products. The batch platform varies depending on who installed it. The iDash feature sits on the top of it, but we're not using that. 

CA7 also extracts and externalizes data without having to be reengineered, which keeps the mainframe people happy.

It's hard to share any information out of it for data analytics or anything like that because its siloed.

Also, we tried the INS data collection feature as well as the DB2 feature (except for data presentation). We're not very happy with those.

I don't recall how long we've used it, but it's been a while.

It deployed without any issue.

We've not had any stability issues.

It scales fine for us.

We tried BMC, CA, and IBM. We tried IBM OMEGAMON for a very long time, 20+ years. CA offers SYSVIEW.

MainView is a BMC product for monitoring. OMEGAMON is monitoring from IBM. Each one of them cover a different set of products.

We use CA Workload Automation ESP Edition to monitor our batch jobs and workload, to process data, and in that processing of data, we make sure that we complete the jobs in a timely manner so that we meet our service levels. 

We also use the alerts within ESP to detect if there's a failure, if there's a long running job or, if there's an issue with the job, within the scheduler, that didn't trigger correctly, and things like that. So that's primarily what we use ESP for.

It performs, it definitely does the job because it's an enterprise type of software, so it's used throughout our whole company. We really liked it, and we applied it throughout the whole company.

The ability to

• monitor your critical work 
• track the service levels 
• recover the work and predict the work, if it's late or not.

It hasn't really improved things because, before that, we had something similar. It hasn't not improved, but it's just necessary to use for the type of work we do.

It's definitely helped us meet our critical deadlines and things like that.

Easier user options with the web browser part of it because it's not very friendly and you can't do as much as you can on the native software. They already know that.

It's very stable. It's highly redundant. It's, like I said, very recoverable, within the batch work and it's easy to use.

Scalability, it's all based on the agents, so we have to place all these agents on different servers. That seems to be doable, so we haven't had any problems with scalability.

We have used technical support. We have small use cases that we need their help on, and we're able to reach out to CA. Tech support is good. We get a good response.

We were using a similar product before 2008, BMC Control-M. We know that's the way we need to manage the work.

I was involved in the initial setup and it's complex because you have to convert from the old software that's not CA to the new software. That was back in 2008 so it's been awhile.

I think there was a list of different types of companies. I can't remember the names because, like I said, it's been a while.

I would say the most important criteria to us when selecting a vendor are

• usability
• operational friendliness
• cost, obviously
• and scalability, because we have a global footprint around the world in different datacenters. 

And it needs to be something that's maintainable or the maintenance is robust. That's something with which we've had good luck, and a good experience, with CA.

I would just say, based on your use case, to see what flavor of ESP you wanted, whether it's the mainframe, or distributed systems, and then understand what kind of functionality you want to achieve from it. Get users' suggestions, if they already have it set up, so you can get past some of those stumbling blocks at the beginning.

What I like about it is that we use it as our enterprise-level scheduling systems. We used to have scattered jobs scheduled. They all had problems every day. The troubleshooting made a huge mess for the whole company. After we started using CA Workload Automation, everything became one integrated system. It makes the troubleshooting and monitoring much easier.

We started with Workload Automation 10 years ago. Before we started, we had about three hundred scheduler jobs distributed in different Unix systems, Window systems, AIX systems. Everyday you need to fix some problem. Once we built the Workload Automation, everything was in one centralized place.

As a management firm, every morning we have to be ready to trade, as soon as the stock market opens. To be able to trade, the nightly cycle jobs are very critical. If any one of them isn’t ready, you cannot trade at 9:30. It's always a struggle for us. For a while, we had about five people just for overnight support. After we integrated Workload Automation into our system, we are down to two people.

Like almost everyone else, we like to make it more web-available. Right now, it's a thick client so you need to have a desktop client do all the work and the monitoring. People like to just go to a browser, look for the jobs and monitor them. That is something we’d like to see. I think we're very happy with this system.

We had some problems at first. I guess every new system has some problems. That was ten years ago. We had a very good consultant from CA. He basically became a resident expert for us for three months. He basically enhanced the whole workload, and improved all those workflows for us. After that, it has been running very smoothly for us.

Our total number of jobs grew about five-fold. We used to have about 100,000 jobs a month. Now we have about a half million jobs a month.

We had one time when we did an upgrade, which did not go smoothly. I remember clearly that we had about 53 open tickets with CA in one week, but CA support is very, very good. They eventually sent us someone who was just wonderful. They sent him to our office and he sat down with us on-site, and he helped us with the whole thing. CA support is wonderful.

The technical support is absolutely the most important to us. When you manage support systems, you want to have someone who can back you up. Luckily CA support is very very good.

I think the initial setup is very straightforward itself. The migration is not. It's not because of the system. It's more because of the job itself. Our firm is about 90 years old. Over the years, it has accumulated a lot of legacy systems, and a lot of legacy jobs. You need to spend time to understand the job when you migrate to a new system.

We had so many NT schedulers, like cron jobs for Unix. We know this is not right. At that time, we luckily had a new CEO. When he came on board, he said the first thing we need to do is to have some enterprise scheduling. I was actually the one who was in charge of finding the right solution.

We went to IBM Tivoli, BMC Control-M; and then we also came to CA. What CA did is: instead of just selling some products to us, they actually sat down with us to understand our environment first. Then they come back to us, and say "Okay, I don't think you guys want to have AutoSys. "At that time, AutoSys was famous. Our environment is not big enough. So they said, "We think the Workload Automation dSeries is actually much better for you." I was very touched by a vendor who came to us and gave us the right solution, instead of just selling us something more expensive. That's the whole reason we chose the dSeries.

If you are considering this product, I would say just go for it. The planning is like I said: the systems stuff itself is easy, but the migration is not. You need to understand what you have now before you move on to different one.

Workload automation and job scheduling.

The graphical interface makes it more accessible to all end-users for monitoring. It also has automated failover, and flexibility in solving job scheduling challenges.

The flexibility allows us to successfully integrate an acquired business’ fiscal close with our own, even though there is a lot of variance as to when they run in the calendar month.

• Easy to use.
• Supports job scheduling on mainframe and distributed systems.

Better documentation with fully explained examples for some of the job types.

No issues with stability.

No issues with scalability.

Excellent support, skilled support technicians.

Old solution did not have a distributed support model that was robust enough.

It was complex. We had to convert our old solution to the new one with no downtime.

I’m not involved with this aspect of the product.

We did not evaluate other options.

This product has allowed us to provide more business value to our company by automating more processes.

You see a lot of automation tools right now in the market. Whenever we try to look at the products that clients are trying to use, we try to see which one is better matched for their requirements. Most of the times, we try to gauge their level of understanding of the products as well. Workload Automation gives a lot of insight for the client, to better understand how they can actually automate the process of scheduling the jobs within their environment. Workload Automation really plays a good role. If you see every product come with its own workload or its own scheduling product so if you talk about SAP, SAP rebuilt its own scheduling product. You talk about Hulu which comes with Uzi which is its own scheduling product. Having a different scheduling product scattered around in the environment, it is really a tough for the management to have a better in-scope of seeing what actually is happening in the scheduling area.

Centralizing all this into a single workload automation tool using the CA product has really helped a lot of customers. This has benefited most of the users to have a better understanding of the environment. It's pretty good compared to the older versions. It actually supports a lot of new features where you can also implement in our clustered solutions and also in higher availability with more of load balancing and everything.

One of my clients who has recently converted everything from the Architecture to what they are using to the complete iPad and solutions. Deploying those solutions and integrating with them was a little challenge at this point of time. We would definitely like to see some kind of roadmap with this workload automation product, having integrations with mobility as well.

It's pretty stable compared to the older versions I would say.

The scalability - it is really good. I mean there are other products which do play the similar roles but having this workload automation in place and having a different product integrating with it whenever there is a need, you have a Windows shop today and tomorrow now most of the clients are trying to migrate from Windows to Unix. When we have that shift change happening, adding more clients and having more support for this operating systems to schedule this systems, this is really playing a lot of help in the scalability of managing this product.

I would rate them a 9 on a scale of 10. They are really good. We had a lot of help at the time of migrations that we usually plan with our clients when we do implement a solution or when we try to do the upgrades. The CA partners usually help us in even mentioning that as a hard site, because of this hard site there will be a dedicated technician who will be helping us. In order that if there is anything working during the migration period or anything like that. We don't really run around with the different people in order to get our solution done. One engineer who is dedicated to our site during that hard site period will be helping and resolving most of the issues. Support is really good with CA. Set-up is depending on the client's environment, how big and how small they are. We just need to understand that better requirements and providing that solution in order to set up this product in their environment. Makes a lot of work that we need to do in order to better understand their requirements

Setup: we can say it's not that complex compared to other products. CA has a very user friendly environment where we can actually do it in no time. Moving towards the mobility because most of the clients are converting themselves from old school sitting in front of their desktops. Everyone wants to manage through mobile products.

Rating: I would say 9/10 because I believe always there is a scope of implement for every product. There is nothing like everything is really best in product so yeah there is still scope of improvement with workload automation tool.

So far what we are doing, we are really happy with this product. When they talk about the workload automation solutions, we definitely try to explain how better it can be having worked with the CA producs compared to others. It's pretty easy because most of the corportation do understand the requirement and what best that solves. The best part of the CA is it is open to integrate with multiple products. It is not that we cannot integrate or we do not have anything like that. The support has more scope where they can also work with us in order to do a third party integration as required as well. I mean it's pretty easy for us.

It schedules application jobs throughout the night for different companies, various companies that AIG processes: American General Life, Life and Retirement Services, and several of their legacy partners. We monitor the input throughout the evening, make sure the cycles are complete, bring up the onlines in the morning, and run jobs per request.

• The automation of it
• The triggering
• The scheduling of the jobs
• The processes

We recently got iDash. So, we are starting to review iDash with CA-7 now, and we are using it.  

Through consistently meeting SLAs, job dependencies, and requirements.

We are not ready to go to the newest release (12.0).

It is very stable.

I do not really deal with that much. Basically, we have four processes running on four different environments.

We have gotten great support from CA. They are there whenever we need them. Whenever we open a case, they are very receptive to the issues that we have and resolve them in a timely manner.

The previous solution was very difficult to manage. The monitoring required somebody to be hands on. 

I was not involved in the initial setup.

It performs really well.

We find scheduling to be the most valuable feature because we can do so on multiple platforms and we can define them once then re-use them.

It's given our organization stability because we're able to perform scheduling functions that provides order and predictability to our workload.

I can't think of anything at the moment.

We've had no issues with deployment.

Never had any issues, which is the main reason we use it. We don’t use other products for scheduling on the mainframe.

We’ve never had any issues. We run over 300,000 jobs a day and we have thousands of end users, at least 10,000 who can evaluate their flows and manage schedules.

We've never needed tech support.

I've always been using it, so there was no previous solution.

The initial setup was done around 30 years ago, so I don't know whether it was simple or complex.

When we look for new products, the user functionality and ease of use are important, as is making sure it's stable. The knowledge transfer is easy.

We still use the green screen on the mainframe terminal screen instead of having a Windows-based view – though it's our decision. Overall, it's a good tool for an entire mainframe environment.