AutoSys Workload Automation Reviews

We're able to monitor a complex workload, easily see where we're at in our batch flows, and take care of problems before they become bigger issues.

We had a stuck file-watcher we weren't aware of, and then because of alerting, instead of missing an SLA, we were able to reach out and get the file in time to still make our batch commitments.

I think just having visibility into it; our managers can see what's going on too. It's not just a single technician that's a bottleneck trying to find out where we are. 

So the visibility into the workflow, and ease of use to be able to schedule.

The main push is the web UI, to be able to give it to our business users. They don't want to have to log in to a mainframe to use the product.

If we can get iDASH into ESP that would help. I know this request is the fourth... We're "in the hole," we're not even on deck. So it's going to come out to DEs, then it will come to us. That would be a big improvement, an option that we'd like to see.

No issues at all. In fact, that's actually one of the, I would say, competitive advantages of this product, the scalability and its ability to do the throughput we would need without having any delays.

We've scaled with it as far as we can grow. I've been talking to other companies that are much larger. I'm confident it could scale. If we had a tenfold growth, we'd still be okay.

I have not used tech support. Other people in my area have. They seem easy to work with. You get the documentation to them; they get back to you in a couple days with what they've found.

Yes, CA Scheduler, at that time. I think they were dropping support for CA Scheduler.

At that time I wasn't high enough up. By the time it rolled out I was happy with how I was able to get up to speed in the product, and support what I needed to support. But I was not involved in evaluating other products.

When choosing to work with a vendor, the most important criteria I look for are

• a long-term relationship
• a partnership
• willing to grow
• willing to listen to feedback
• support
• that they'll help us do our job.

I've worked with CA Workload Automation so I'm happy. I would say they're a nine out of 10 because I don't know anyone else. It's all relative. They could be a 10. I'm happy with them. I don't have any complaints. They're responsive.

Make sure you partner with them. Get buy-in from your business units before implementing. I think that's one of the biggest keys to success. If you don't feel comfortable let them explain their product. Get the buy-in first, then move forward so you don't have the resentment of, "Hey, you're forcing this product on us."

It's been great.

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.

CA Workload Automation AE (AutoSys Edition) should have a few features like the CA7 FQJOB command (to get all the downstream/upstream jobs with the batch current position).

I have used this solution for seven years.

We have not encountered any stability issues with the supported versions.

We have not encountered any scalability issues with the supported versions.

Technical support is 9/10; good and timely support.

It is a bit costly. (Again, it all depends on the enterprise and the requirements.)

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

I would suggest implementing CA Workload Automation AE.

It's a pretty solid product. The stability of it is probably its best feature. Also, the newer versions are going to have extended job numbers.

It's our hub for all our job scheduling, so basically everything we do goes through there.

Upgrades to the GUI interface would be probably one of the biggest things they could do to improve. With the up and coming youth of today, they want to be on a GUI instead of on a mainframe, so a better GUI interface would probably be the best upgrades they've had. Plus the CLI could be improved.

We've had no issues with deployment since implementing it.

One of the biggest strengths is the stability of the product.

No, not really. We've had no issues with scaling it.

Technical support is very good. They're always on top of things.

My advice would be to compare CA to BMC. We did, and found CA to be the better product.

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.

The valuable feature is that it is mainframe.

We did not have the visibility of the distributed jobs until we used ESP Workload automation and we can now schedule them together with our mainframe jobs.

We've had stability problems with the tool.

It is scalable, but we're probably not using it to the best of our ability. We might be migrating to CA Workload Automation iDash.

I haven’t used technical support, but one of my coworkers has used them and she’s happy with them.

I was involved with the installation. At first, I found it to be complex, but now I think it's pretty user-friendly.

We were looking at IBM. Because our industry was growing as far as using servers, CA was a better fit.

I would recommend this product to others.

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.