AutoSys Workload Automation Reviews

It's our enterprise workload automation scheduler. 

It performs pretty well, it's a pretty stable product.

It allows you to automate tasks, and reduce headcount, prevent errors, self-heal, self-service type technologies.

• Ease of use 
• Scripting capabilities

In the next release I would like to see the Service Orchestrator, a B2B product, and maybe a process audit.

It's very stable. Just the usual database problems, but the application, normally, doesn't have any problems at all.

The system itself is not scalable but you can add multiple connections into it. You can use the APIs to integrate with other systems.

We use tech support all the time. They're pretty good. The response time from them depends on the complexity of the problem. They could do better sometimes.

It's a requirement for all large corporations to have some type of enterprise scheduler. We went with CA because they are a good partner, and they're pretty stable, and they acquire everybody else. They only have two main competitors, IBM or BMC.

Straightforward. It's not difficult.

Our most important criterion when selecting a vendor is the partnership.

I give the solution an eight because it has a few quirks, but it's a pretty reliable system. They could do better supporting it. They have too many of the same type of products, so sometimes it doesn't get as much attention as it should.

I would advise a colleague who is looking at similar solutions to stay informed with the technology, and engage with the CA reps. 

I would recommend it whole-heartedly.

Scheduling, mainframe, workload.

It has performed great.

Its stability and reliability, that it's been there for 20 years and 30 years, and it's always been the number one scheduler.

We can handle large workloads, and put a lot of jobs into scheduling very quickly, and we can control a lot of workload through CA 7.

We're looking at distributed AutoSys to integrate with CA 7. And iDASH is another product that we're looking, at and we need the two to be able to talk to each other and be able to view the dependencies across the platforms.

If they can integrate the distributive side with the mainframe side, and a better view to both sides of that, that would be good.

Stability is awesome.

Scalibility is great.

Technical support is very good. We reach the right representatives.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup. They were already a CA 7 customer when I joined. I have been involved in some of the upgrades. They can be a little complex. It's just a big complex product that takes a lot of evaluation.

When we are researching different products or vendors we do a pretty thorough evaluation of all the products. They have to meet our objectives of reducing the risk and cost. Those are the two most important: risk, cost.

I would recommend CA 7.

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.

For workload automation, I think the most valuable feature is the robustness, being able to support high availability for as many batch jobs that we process on a daily basis.

It is a key one for our company. We run it as an enterprise solution; everything from payrolls, to manufacturing, to everything in the back end, is critical. We definitely can count on it being up all the time.

A couple of key features would be really being able to support a scheduler that, instead of a centralized scheduler, maybe a distributed one, so where a scheduler doesn't come down; not everything stops all at one time and so on.

Stability is actually why we selected this solution, for being able to support high availability. Otherwise, we wouldn't go to a single instance of it across the company.

Scalability is actually what supports our decision to go with it. Being able to go from supporting one organization to all our organizations across the company, has been great.

Technical support has been outstanding. They've been able to really answer a lot of the questions that we've gone to for them. Turnaround has been great. Typically, if we put in a ticket, we get a response within hours, at least within 24 hours.

I wasn't engaged in the setup, but I know there were some complexities when we first started, because we were dealing with multiple instances and trying to get it to one and so on.

Definitely look at this product. There are a lot of key features in there that will definitely help organizations out.

It really supports, and CA's been great in showing the robustness of the tool and addressing any issues with anything that you come across with it.

I think there're still some more improvements in there, some things that we're finding out as we're using it, the tool. It's definitely on the higher end.

CA Workload Automation automates across multiple platforms. We're actually getting rid of our mainframe; so it's allowed us to use a distributive scheduling package. Getting rid of our mainframe is a big deal to my company.

It enables you to tie into audit systems, gives you a lot of visibility as far as workload goes, and allows you to automate it as well.

On the mainframe version of ESP, there was a scheduling parameter called NOTWITH. If you placed this parameter on two jobs you didn’t want running at the same time, ESP would recognize that one was running and the other wouldn’t run, even if its scheduling requirements had been met. This allowed our company to combat contention issues without creating extra or false predecessor/successor relationships. The D-series, ESP-DE, doesn’t have this parameter. Once we realized how much we were leveraging this feature on the mainframe version, and that we wouldn’t have it on ESP-DE, we were a little disappointed. I’m not sure how much of an undertaking it would be to have it added to ESP-DE, but it would be very beneficial to us, as well as other DE clients that I spoke with at Ca World. Hopefully this could be added to the next release of DE and we could get it in before we go totally live in production with DE early this summer.

The secure SimLib/password feature from Autosys I was referencing gave us the ability to hide/secure environment variables by storing them on a totally different server in which security could be controlled. Once the job ran that used the environment variable, or database password, a developer or operator couldn’t see the environment variable/database password resolved in the spool file. Basically what we’re looking for is the ability to store database passwords or environment variables, on or in ESP, without them being seen by a developer or operator. We don’t want anyone to see the resolved environment variables in the spool file or to have to store them on the server. Currently we’re having to store these environment variables on the server, which isn’t a permanent solution according to our Security Admins.

It seems stable, as far as I know. It's been around for awhile, so it's a good product. From our testing, it's been fine. We have a failover situation as well that we've tested; so it's worked fine for us.

We don't have any problems with scalability either. That seems to be fine for us.

Initial setup was fairly straightforward. Well, the biggest thing was that we were already using Workload Automation ESP for mainframe; so we just took that and moved it to the distributed engine, or to the DE series. There are a lot of similarities between the two.

We compared CA Workload Automation with IBM, as well as BMC. We went with CA because we really like the interface, and the way it worked with our products that we already had in house. We did have a bunch of other CA products, and it seemed to tie in pretty well with those.

It just depends on what they're coming from. If they're coming from the mainframe flavor, just know that they are similar, but there are still some very glaring differences that you have to accommodate to.

Some of the features I like are:

• Ability to monitor a complex workload
• Easily see our batch flow status
• Deal with problems before they become bigger issues

As an example, we had a stuck file watcher we weren't aware of. Due to the alerts, we were able to reach out and get the file in time to still make our batch commitments. This happened instead of missing an SLA.

I think having visibility has improved things. Our managers can see what's going on as well. It's not just a single technician that's a bottleneck trying to find out where we are. Visibility into the workflow and ease of use to be able to schedule have improved our organization. I'm happy with this solution.

The main push is the web UI. We want to be able to give it to our business users. They don't want to have to log on to a mainframe to use the product. I would like to use iDash. If we can get iDash into ESP, it would be great, even though it first has to go to the DEs before it comes to us. That would be a big improvement. This is an option that we'd like to see.

No problems with scalability. That's actually one of the competitive advantages with this product - the scalability and its ability to do the throughput we need without having any delays. We have scaled 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 and we'd still be okay.

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

We were using CA Scheduler Job Management and I think they ended support. I wasn't high enough up to be involved in the decision making process. By the time this solution 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 looking for a vendor, I suggest looking for long-term relationships, a partnership. You want a vendor who is willing to grow, willing to listen to feedback, offers support, and help us do our job. Make sure you partner with them. Get buy-in from your business units before implementing. I think that's one of the biggest things to success, is let CA get the buy-in for you if you don't feel comfortable doing it yourself. Let CA explain their own product. Get the buy-in first, then move forward so you don't have the resentment of the business units thinking you forced the solution upon them.

I have a lot of jobs that run using CA 7. So I work with my production analysts to set up processes that helps me do things that I don't have to do manually.

One of the things I do is that I am in charge of replication. We replicate from Livingston, New Jersey through Fort Worth, Texas, and replication from time to time will drop because people do things that cause links go down. So when they fail, there is a manual way to recover them, but I have to type out all these commands. Because I know what I need to do I put stuff in jobs and using CA Process Automation and CA 7 together to bring over my replication without ever doing anything manually.

I've used this product for a long time, but the GUI to me feels outdated. I know how to use it well, but it feels old.

We've used it for over 20 years.

Deployment is not an issue.

CA 7 is stable all the time.

It's very scalable. There's no problem there.

I haven't had to use technical support.

I wasn't involved in the setup.

I'm sure 90% of the world uses CA 7, so it's a known product.

It's a cross-platform scheduler. Any kind of automation that we actually do is over different platforms.

Automation in general. You need to do less manually.

Scheduling in general. Running anything in crontab, you need to put a lot of logic into it to make it work. With this product, you don't have to worry about it. You have the schedule object where you put all the dates or holidays in it, and it does it for you. 

I would like to see two-factor authentication, since you see a lot of companies in the news for security breaches. That is a really big thing for us.

Stability is great. We generally have no outages.

We're actually going to be upgrading to version 12, so we're looking forward to it.

This is probably something you don't want to hear, but support seems to be getting worse over the years. For some reason the technical knowledge is missing. Occasionally, you actually have to get all the way to Austria to actually get a resolution, which is where the product is originally from.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup but I do the upgrades. They're straightforward.

We've been using the product for 12, 13 years, so it's been a while.

My most important criterion when selecting a vendor is stability. in general. We want to make sure our customers who use the system never have any downtime.

Give it a try. Test it out. Set up a system, play around with it. It's very easy to work with. The learning curve is not that steep.