AutoSys Workload Automation Reviews

CA Workload Automation AutoSys Edition is one of the most powerful schedulers that you have on the open systems, or going between Window servers; to be able to schedule and take advantage of the different powers that the automation has with it.

I've taken advantage of not only the normal command jobs and stuff like that, but I've turned them into using the proper plugins, the job types. One of the things that I have found out is that I'm the one that's using most of the job types, because I've taken away the need for writing or scripting processes. When somebody knows the database and knows how to write SQL code, or they know how to write a stored procedure, they don't need to know how to write scripting in order to run their scripts.

It's a little bit of a cost savings thing by using a plugin and using the different job types that AutoSys has. It goes the same thing when you're running a web service and you want to update stuff.

Taking care of the customers is the number one thing for any client; the client that I'm with, it's the same thing. They want to make sure that the customers are happy.

The benefit of using this product is the fact that your return on investment is major. When you don't have to teach people how to script or how to write different codes because of the way they connect to stuff, you're saving money, because you're able to put stuff into a production environment in a much faster solution.

We're also able to update our customers and let them know via apps to be able to see from using a web service to run and they log in to see what their activity is or what the status is on their stuff. It's updated immediately.

Cost benefits are amazing because somebody doesn't have to call a customer service person and sit on the phone for 30 minutes to find out the same thing they can find out in two seconds on the internet.

To make it a lot more user-friendly, in order to make it so other people can use it without having to do much training with it; the more user-friendly it is, the easier it is to work with.

The product has been out since 2.0 which is when I started working with this Workload Automation and, have seen it grow to a more powerful system that has been able to resolve all types of different automation appliances.

Customer Service is as always a high quality and, have had great success with getting any issues resolved.

Great working with the Tech team.

I think it's one of the most powerful workload automation processes that are out there. It is able to reach across platforms. It's able to reach across appliances. It's able to update.

It's a matter of your return on investment. It goes right back to that. How much do you want to spend, but how much are you going to save?

The integration that it provides and the auditing features are the most valuable to us. It also gives us an end-to-end solution that we can give our clients.

It simplifies everything and also takes human error out of a lot of things.

I would like to see a better front end for job creation that does everything for you, so it also automates the process.

In addition, I would also like to see a job form, i.e., a fill-out form for the job requests. I also want to see it set up files, folders, security, policies, etc., and automate JIL creation.

Now, it has become very stable. In the earlier releases, I have seen some issues but with the current release, it is very stable. We've been very happy with this.

The product is very scalable. With the way we have ours set up, it allows for rapid extension, if needed, but we have never maximized our systems.

We have used the technical support and it's good. They're very knowledgeable and very willing to help.

We have not used any other solution before. We've been using this product for a long time.

You should look at some of the use cases because there are so many people that have so many different setups, with so many different ways to do it. We have found the most efficient way and that is why everyone comes to us and uses our agents.

In my opinion, the most important criteria whilst selecting a vendor is reliability.

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.

We use it as an IT process automation solution.

We automate recurring processes, keeping track of IT processes controlled worldwide.

We often have to implement complicated processes. Automic Automation Engine provides us the ability to map logic using a scripting language. We have an advantage where practically all automation problems can easily be implemented within the Automation Engine.

We see improvement possibilities in the processing provision of predefined evaluations or individual objects, or in the Self Service portal, which can be used by any user to monitor objects or start objects.

We have had no issues.

We have had no issues.

Technical support is always very helpful, though we do not use it often. 

All our problems have been resolved so far. Tips have also been provided on how we can handle a problem.

We had scheduled jobs on a mainframe system. By replacing the mainframe with a Unix system, we also changed the scheduler.

The setup of the system was relatively easy. 

We had good local support from Automic.

Everyone has to decide for themselves which licensing model is best suited to their environment.

We evaluated between different scheduling systems. We finally decided on the Automic solution.

Consult onsite support for the first implementation. Errors made at the beginning can only be corrected with great effort afterwards.

Enterprise job scheduling.

It has helped to simplify cross-dependency between MVS and Open systems jobs.

Also adding new agents is easy, scheduling is easier and faster.

• Enterprise cross-platform scheduling
• MVS scheduling

We have couple of hundred thousand jobs scheduled monthly via ESP so it is critical.

Reduce the number of operational files. This would make the job of a system programmer supporting ESP easier. In the present design, there are too many operational files to maintain.

No issues with stability.

No issues with scalability.

I would rate them nine and a half out of 10. CA technical support is doing a great job.

We had to choose an alternate scheduling tool.

It is relatively simple.

Great tool, excellent technical support, stable product.

The product does all of our enterprise scheduling. 

We use it for a number of our clients. So far, we have had great success with it. It works constantly and is pretty seamless. You do not have to open up many support tickets. The product works very well for us.

Ease of use.

I am more interested in converting more schedulers over to this particular solution, so the ease of the conversion tools.

We have not pushed it to its limit.

We were being pushed by BMC, and CA came forth and gave us a lower cost solution.

The system programmer who worked on the project, he actually set it up within a week. There was a couple of tweaking, turning, and configurations that had to be done after that, but it was up and running in about 10 days. We were able to convert another scheduler over to it without an issue.

LRS, Rocket Software, and CA. We chose CA because of the support of the products and the relationship.

As far as I know, the product is just doing its job for us at this point.

If researching this solution and on an existing scheduler, just make sure you can convert over to this particular solution without risk. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: How we work together. I have to trust them. Also, their overall support. 

Usually what we end up doing with Workload Automation is, we have a lot of different jobs: different batch scripts, PHP scripts, everything that we need to run at specific times in chains, with banner-related instances, which means different database connections. We need all the stuff to happen, we need to know that it's going to happen, and if it doesn't we need to make sure that we get logs as to why. That's usually the general work case that we have.

It's performed very well. I think right now the one issue that we're having is we have a lack of documentation on it and the different jobs that are inside of it. But the platform itself is working very well.

The most valuable feature is probably just the robustness of the platform itself, where you can go in and put any code inside of it and, as long as the server that you have it running on has the legs to be able to execute all that, it's good to go.

We don't have to manually run things anymore. We can have the work that a team of 50 people would do, all inside of one platform.

Again, lack of documentation, that is an issue. When we do need to bring it down for maintenance, it is always a scary moment for us because we have never had it crash. When we don't have any documentation, we don't really know what to expect if we do have to bring it down but there haven't really been any issues with it.

I'm probably not the right one to ask about features for upcoming versions mostly because we are using an old version of this product. However, if I had to, I'd probably say that it would be really nice if it had the ability to see, on a more top-level scale, what's going on inside of the system. Right now it is very granular. You do have to get very deep into the system to see what jobs are happening, when they're happening, how they're happening, if anything's failed. If they could have a more high-level view of that, that would be really nice.

I gave it an eight out of 10 because we are using an older version right now. I'm sure the newer version that they have is really great. 

The thing that's preventing us from upgrading to the latest version is personnel resources. We don't have enough staff. I think after this conference (CA World) we're probably going to be setting up new servers to go ahead and update. With that, we have a lot of financial related things on our version, so shifting everything over to the new version is going to take a lot of time. We don't know exactly how it's going to be different.

It is very stable. We haven't had it go down yet so that's very nice, that's always good. We've been using it about 10 years now and we've never had any crashes.

We haven't had any issues. If we need more space, we just throw more space on the servers. If we need to have it connect to more databases or more services, there really is no issue with it.

We have used it before, however, we haven't really needed it too much. Usually, most of the issues that we would have, you can find documentation about them somewhere online. We also know that there are other universities in Georgia that use this product so we usually end up reaching out to them before we have any other issues.

When choosing a vendor, since we're a university, what is important is the cost, and then who does it benefit. Is it going to benefit the student body? If it does, perfect. It does benefit the employees, perfect. Other than that, are there any other people, any other companies that offer something similar, and what do they do. Outside of that, how hard is it going to be for us to bring them on and what does a company do with the data that we give them. That is a very important piece. If we have to give student data to that system, does that student data go anywhere? If it does, that violates federal laws, things like that.

As far as advice, make sure that you document everything. As you're setting it up, work closely with other universities, figure out what best cases are going to be, best practices. Really just have a deep understanding of what you are wanting to do with it, what jobs that you want it to do, what processes are you wanting to map out.

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.