Control-M Reviews

Control-M is a scheduler tool, and we have multiple batch jobs that are currently running in our organization. 

We are currently one version behind the latest one. The latest version is 9.0.19.200, which also has Control-M Python Client, and we are planning to go for the latest version.

We currently have it on-premises on the Windows platform. We are planning to migrate to AWS.

We have multiple technologies, and we have different types of jobs, such as Informatica jobs, SAP jobs, database jobs, web service jobs, etc. In such an environment, from the support perspective, usually, we need to log in to multiple technologies and check if a job is executed or not and if there is any error, which is not easy. Control-M acts as a one-stop shop to check the status of all jobs. The maintenance or support team members can easily log into Control-M and verify the job status.

It has been helpful in reducing the burden on our resources during the weekend. It has also been helpful in reducing delays and data mismatches.

It is easy to create, integrate, and automate data pipelines with Control-M. You can drop and drag whatever you want and then provide a time for the scheduler. There are many inbuilt plug-ins, such as the Informatica plug-in and the SAP plug-in. We are using these plugins. It is pretty easy and simple.

It allows us to ingest and process data from different platforms. For example, you can have a flow that starts with a REST call. Once that is processed, the records are picked from the database and sent to SAP. You can easily design a pipeline workflow and schedule jobs. You can also specify the dependencies. For example, you can specify to execute Job B when Job A is completed or execute Job C when Job A and B are completed. There are multiple options in Control-M to ingest and not miss data from any platform.

Testing is easy. You can have multiple environments, such as development environment, testing environment, staging environment, and production environments. You can easily test your workflows, and you can easily promote from one environment to another environment. You can promote from the development environment to the staging and production environment. There is an option called Promote, and you can use that option to promote to whichever environment you want.

We are an enterprise, and when the data moves from one technology to another technology, multiple teams get involved, which requires multiple communication exchanges between the teams. Sometimes, there might also be delays in getting the data from one team. With Control-M, we can create a workflow where we can specify to proceed for job B after job A. There is no need for a team to send emails to another team. There is no delay. Team A doesn't have to inform team B to run a job because otherwise, there will be a delay. Control-M eliminates such issues. It has improved our business service delivery speed.

It has good reporting capabilities. You can get a report of the status of all your jobs. You can see how many jobs are pending and how many are processed. You can also share these reports with the management. There is also a URL that you can give to your management or customers. They can check the job status, and they will have knowledge about the status and any abnormalities.

Automation of Control-M has improved the speed of process execution. No manual intervention is required using Control-M. You don't need to have a resource waiting to do a job at a certain time. You can automatically schedule a job, even over the weekend. It results in faster speed and better utilization of resources. You can also integrate it with other solutions. For example, if a job fails, a ticket can automatically be created in ServiceNow or BMC Remedy and assigned to a specific group so that they can look into it.

I find Control-M for SAP and Control-M for Informatica good. You can connect to the Linux or Windows servers, and you can run multiple jobs. 

Control-M Managed File Transfer is also a very nice feature for transferring multiple files.

It meets our requirements, and it is simple and easy to use. 

They can give more predefined plug-ins so that we don't have to create them. 

The security layer for Control-M MFT can be better. 

We have been using Control-M for the past six years.

Its stability is good.

Its scalability is good. We would like to increase its usage, but its price is a challenge.

Their technical support is very good. They also have a community portal. I would rate them a nine out of ten.

Positive

We didn't use any other solution previously.

I am responsible for installing and managing Control-M. Its initial setup was straightforward. It took about nine hours to get it installed and up and running. The number of people required for deployment and management of jobs depends on the scope of your operations. If you have 50,000 jobs a day, two people are enough.

Its maintenance is handled by the server team. We have it on-premises, and they take care of the patches and upgrades. If it was on the cloud, the upgrades would be done automatically.

Its pricing is a little bit high. They could provide an enterprise-level license for an unlimited number of jobs. Currently, it is based on the number of jobs, and if you exceed the number of jobs, there are charges. For example, if your license is for 3,000 jobs per day, but you run 3,050 jobs, you will have to pay for the extra 50 jobs. They charge $120 per job. So, it is too costly.

To someone who is looking for a process automation solution but is concerned that Control-M isn’t modern enough to work with multiple cloud-based data sources and tools, I would say that Control-M is the best option even when working with cloud-based data sources. 

I would rate it a nine out of ten. Control-M is the best solution to replace any enterprise solution if its price suits you.

We have used Control-M mostly as a file transfer and in conjunction with Hadoop.

We have many feeds coming in from different companies which are used by the business for various reasons and we must collectively have a central point to gather the files and feeds. We also use Control-M for encryption, decryption, and sending data across to different business users that begin at a point of time and making sure that we are not missing unnecessarily. It's a real help what we are getting. The example for us is we have a lot of business which depends on feeds which, if not properly processed, affect the stock exchange. So Control-M acts as a mediator in between that and provides it in a very efficient way. This has reduced a lot of manual intervention required as a business.

The feature we use most in Control-M is related to the file transfer module. It is quite advanced compared to other tools like Automate, etc. The new version which has come of same MFT has a lot of advanced features which makes it very easy to work with. There is less need for written programs and more GUI-based stuff.

One feature I would like to include is in the middle of the monitoring domain. In the monitoring domain, if I have to update a number of jobs, the only way to do it is by manually clicking on each job. I would like a feature that allows me to do a mass update in the jobs, which I feel is still lacking.

This version has done an amazing change, compared to version 7 and the versions after that. I'm not sure what they should change at this stage. One recent feature they have come up with is if we can upgrade Control-M agents from a central location. I would still prefer a solution where I can do an installation of the controller module from a remote distance. That's something they don't have. I know why it has still not come up, but it could be a great feature if we could include that somehow. To push out these sort of installation setup files onto another machine and get it in installed. It is not there for now, though.

I would rate this solution as eight out of ten. The reason for this rating is because of the scope of implementation. It will have an ultimately upper hand to the other tools in the market. They can show what most other controls don't have. Nevertheless, these features would really help as well. I would like to see more of them.

It is a very stable solution and BMC, the parent company, really comes up with tech packs and upgrades, which add new features and also resolve issues. Also, their knowledge base is quite full, which helps a lot to find the solution easily from the website.

I rate them nine out of ten for scalability.

On average, the control team consists of around fifteen people. This ranges from the elements of both which is the monitoring team and the L2 support which is for the scheduling team. Then there is also L3, who is the administrator. Apart from that, we have certain business users that will use the help service module often.

If we are looking at a 24 path sell and support, we would need close to seven members on a daily basis. That's the same for L1, L2, and L3 teams to each do daily support. L1 would be for monitoring, L2 for scheduling, and L3 is administrative.

We do have certain programs to increase usage down the line, which we're considering. I would say close to 60 to 65 percent of the company is using Control-M right now.

The technical support is great and I would give it a ten.

My main experience is with this as the central unit, but I have used other tools. The main reason I chose Control-M was firstly that it is user-friendly. Secondly, the market is wide open for Control-M, and a lot of other organizations use it. So it gives Control-M the upper hand in the market to work on something like this.

It was quite simple since Control-M has a very user-friendly GUI. That made it fairly easy to relate with the business and convert it into something which looks familiar.

We kind of started from scratch, so I think it took two to three months for us to set everything up at the initial stage. The strategy was to tackle one business at a time so that we don't complicate stuff because not everything is automated. We started to target one business/application at a time and converted them each into something which Control-M can work with.

We did the deployment on our own based on our experience. We had previously deployed it for certain clients basically so we were primarily the consultant for that.

I may not be able to convert it into a value in this way, but it does more in terms of reducing manual intervention. This, in turn, means less human resources are being used. For instance, if there are three people in a team and controlling certain work, they could probably put more on one resource. So that reduces the cost of resources in the whole organization.

We have account based licensing. There are two or three types of licensing. One of them is based on the number of jobs, so we a license close to 4,000 jobs per day.

The cost is based on the different modules, which we buy from them. If we a buy a hardware module, which we are presently using and integrating, that is an additional cost, but I'm not sure of the amount. Each module comes with a different cost.

I have experience with alternates like IBM Tivoli and another software called JAMS. These are the ones that I have worked on and the features and user-friendliness of both of them is fine. It's such a different level compared to this, so that's the reason I'm sticking to Control-M.

For those who want to implement, there are a few cons. Cost-wise it is not very simple for every business to implement it. So they should really plan if they are going to use it extensively. If not, they should think twice about it. 

If they are thinking of implementing, though, they should analyze the business and check which controller modules will really help them enhance their work and ultimately transform their work into an automated solution, which in turn will reduce their cost. 

I would really suggest someone who is planning to use Control-M or wants to deploy is first to check which modules are really required and also what kind of licensing makes sense for their business. If its a very large enterprise then it would be great to use a premium based license. If not, it's better to use a job count based license. So that is a point which they should check before implementing.

The major use cases we have are batch processing and MFT. We are heavy users of the MFT plugin.

One of the benefits of Control-M is that it's helping to give business users visibility into and control over their jobs, and freeing up IT personnel to focus on other operations. Here, I'm mainly thinking of MFT. Our MFT end-users did not have access to our prior MFT tools at all, so they couldn't see the jobs. They would just request a job be built and then we would publish job reports so that they could see what was out there. Now, in Control-M, we're able to give them job-control access. We still lock down the building of file transfer jobs, but they now have the ability to see a job and see how it's built. They can run a job and hold a job if they need to.

But even for some of the batch jobs, we've written some orderable services that are allowing them to run jobs on-demand, jobs that they used to have to log in to a server and go through a menu to do. Our business users definitely have much higher capabilities in our product now.

And while we are primarily on virtual servers, we are in the process of standing up some agents in the cloud. We have our first agent in AWS up and we're getting ready to do some testing on it. That's pretty critical. There's a really big push within our organization to move into cloud. A lot of our next-gen apps that are going to be replacing the current ones are being built in the cloud. We have that first agent out there, but I assume there are going to be many more to follow as these new applications are stood up in the public cloud. Today we're on-prem, but I definitely envision us moving the entire Control-M stack to the cloud. Eventually, it will be in the cloud and we'll just have a couple of agents on-prem, versus being on-prem and having just a couple of agents in the cloud.

Control-M has also helped to make it easier to create, integrate, and automate data pipelines across on-premises and cloud technologies. It's due to the ability to orchestrate between workflows that are running in the cloud and workflows that are running on-prem. It gives us the ability to have end-to-end workflows, no matter where they're running.

The automation is one of the most valuable features.

New plugins could be tested better. We've had a lot of problems with the MFT plugin. We've been working through a lot of issues with BMC on it.

The functionality that has existed for long periods is very stable. But the problems with the MFT plugin specifically, and problems we've had with MFT in general, have unfortunately caused the entire stack to be affected enough that our end-users couldn't even log in to the application. 

I wish we would have known better about how MFT impacts the application as a whole, and I wish they would have done more load testing around that. That seems to be where most of our issues have been. The issues have been so bad sometimes that the entire app goes down, not just MFT.

I've been using Control-M for about two and a half years.

The stability of Control-M has Not been great. A big thing we've been trying to work on with BMC is observability. Modern applications should be observable and resilient, but we're finding that sometimes Control-M is not very resilient and many times Control-M is not very observable. We're working with BMC to try and figure out how we can externally monitor this application. 

We are using Dynatrace because of the problems we've had with Control-M. If we stood up Control-M and never had any problems, we probably wouldn't be too worried about being able to observe the processes and the queues and the communication between processes. But because we've had so many problems, it has forced us to dig in. We can't wait for a problem to happen and wait for a week for support to tell us how to fix it. We can't do that in a production environment. We have to know before a problem happens so that we can be proactive and not reactive. That's been a big struggle that we're continuing to work with BMC on.

It's pretty scalable. You can stand up a ton of agents and you can stand up a ton of servers, if you need scheduling servers. Scheduling and agents are definitely very scalable.

There isn't the ability to really scale the EM (Enterprise Manager) a ton, although the GUI can be scaled somewhat. I don't know how much of a need there is to be able to scale the EM. We don't seem to have issues on the EM side, for the most part.

We're definitely having issues with the gateway between the EM and the scheduling server, but BMC is telling us that it's because we're running too many file transfers on the scheduling server. They say that if we stand up more scheduling servers, that should resolve that issue. We'll see if it does, if we still have any issues after we spread the load of MFT, not only over more agents, but also over more schedulers. If we still have issues after that, I think that would mean you're pretty limited in how you can scale your EM. That is the one thing about which I'm not sure how well it scales.

Technical support is very back-and-forth. That's one of my gripes about the support. We open a case, they ask us for logs, we upload logs, and they come back and ask us for something else. 

At times, there isn't a lot of what I would call working together with them. We do now, but that's because we had a ton of support cases piling up and we started escalating with their internal leadership. Now, there are weekly meetings between our leadership and their leadership and our account managers, as well as weekly meetings with the support team and the dev team, to talk through our cases and any updates on them.

It took a lot of pushing from our end to get them to work with us. Otherwise, they just asked for logs and then we were waiting for a couple of days for them to look through all the logs and get back to us. We can't be doing that, especially if the issue is a production problem. We can't just upload logs every time we open a case and wait around for two weeks to get an answer.

Another gripe is that they're very siloed in what they know. Something that I've been asking for for a long time, from BMC, is somebody who can take a look at our environment as a whole, and not just in pieces. Every time we open a case with support, they want to assign it to a specific area. If it's a problem with the agent, then an agent person will look at it. If it's a problem with the EM, then an EM person will look at it. But nobody is looking at the environment as a whole. That's an issue because a lot of our problems, as I've mentioned, with MFT, are impacting the entire environment. It's not just one component. It's the entire environment and how those components relate and how they communicate that have been impacted. Nobody has really looked at the environment as a whole, in support. I think it would benefit BMC to have more experts on the entire application and not have everybody so siloed.

Neutral

The initial setup was a little complex, due to some of the requirements. It requires that you have C shell as it doesn't work with the regular BASH shell. There are some old mainframe requirements that have carried through the product, even though we don't run it on mainframes. For example, the user that you use to run it has to be under seven characters long. We had to modify the account we use because the name was too long.

We're still really trying to get our environment squared away. We started two and a half years ago, but we've got a laundry list of applications that we're migrating out of and we've only completed one of those migrations. We're having to modify our architecture now because of the load that we are running. I'm working with professional services at BMC to review our existing architecture so that they can give us a BMC-supported design recommendation.

One of the competitors we are migrating from is Broadcom/CA. Broadcom bought a couple of products. They own both AutoSys and Automic, and we are migrating out of both of those solutions. AutoSys has been pretty straightforward to migrate into Control-M because the job configuration is pretty simple. However, the Automic workflows are very complex. They utilize certain features that only Automic offers, things that we can't replicate in Control-M. That is causing a lot of issues and has caused us to put that project on hold for the time being, until we can work through some of the problems that are being presented. We've been migrating Broadcom for at least a year now.

Some applications are pretty straightforward. MOVEit is an example of one that's a pretty straightforward conversion. However, another tool we have, Diplomat MFT, has a backup file structure that is not what the conversion tool was expecting. We ended up writing a custom Python script to do that conversion for us. The ease of migration really depends on what application you're migrating out of. It could be very complex or very easy.

The migration process is a very high concern. We selected Control-M due to the ability to migrate everything into it and have everything in one tool. If we can't get our migrations completed, then Control-M will just be another tool on top of all the other ones that we have to support.

We used VPMA for the deployment. Our experience with them went pretty well. They're definitely very knowledgeable about the product

I don't know that they, or really, as I said earlier, even BMC had all the knowledge around how MFT could impact the application as a whole, back when we originally bought this. MFT was very new back then. VPMA did their best and guided us as much as they could, but I just don't think the plugin for MFT, specifically, was very mature yet. There were probably a lot of unknowns there.

We had a pre-sales team from BMC that helped us in the very beginning, before we worked with VPMA. They were nice, but I wouldn't say they were very knowledgeable. They had a very surface-level knowledge of the application. They didn't know anything that was deep. They would have to find out for us and get back to us.

It's not my realm, but I would assume Control-M has not helped us realize any savings on renewal costs after switching from Broadcom. The cost of an agent is significantly higher for Control-M than it is for Automic or AutoSys.

We are paying way more for Control-M than we've paid for any of our other scheduling tools. We have an inside joke that Control-M is sold as the "Bentley" of schedulers, but we feel that we got a "Pontiac" because it's falling apart half of the time.

BMC has two licensing models. One is where you pay by job execution and the other is where you pay by endpoints. I'm sure the specifics vary depending on the customer, but we opted to go with endpoint licensing. I'm not sure if that was the best decision, knowing what we know now.

With endpoint licensing, we pay per server. That means it behooves us to run as many jobs as we can on each of those servers. But we're very much finding that even if we make those servers very large and give them a ton of resources, they're still not able to perform because Control-M doesn't scale very well vertically. If you make the agent bigger, if you double the CPU and RAM, that doesn't necessarily mean you can run twice as many jobs. It's going to choke in other areas. 

We will see if we end up switching our licensing model. I think the endpoint licensing model we chose is quite a bit more expensive than an equivalent model where we would pay per execution. We would definitely have to change a lot about our environment if we were to change our licensing model from endpoint to execution, because today we give all of our end-users the ability to run jobs on-demand. If we were to change our licensing model to be based on executions, we would probably want to restrict that a little. 

The way you license is a very large consideration when moving to Control-M.

We really haven't taken advantage of some of the features that Control-M offers yet. The main thing I'm thinking of is SLA management. We haven't implemented that yet on a lot of our business-critical workflows because we just lifted and shifted everything into Control-M from the old app. As of today, things are pretty much equal until we are able to implement some of those additional features.

There are capabilities that Control-M offers that are good and I can see it being a very good product. BMC, as a company, has some maturing it needs to do in a lot of its processes. They have a very good sales team, but a lot of things after that can use some work.

We definitely haven't bailed on it, but I've heard a little bit, back and forth, from people at BMC that they might not be too upset if they lost us as a customer because we've been having so many problems. We've been on them about helping us get this environment corrected and functioning as we expect it to. But in a year from now, it's possible we could be in a really good place. I'm excited to see where it all goes.

We use Control-M to monitor jobs on the endpoints. We monitor throughout the day to see which jobs fail. It helps resolve issues with the programmers. They know if they want to rerun, force complete, or hold a job. We work hand in hand with the programmers who have the final say on what they want to do with a particular job that requires action. Control-M is deployed across multiple locations, but I can't estimate the number of users.

Control-M is a critical part of our operations. We rely on it to do our jobs daily. It helps us automate things that come from the JCL side where you would normally have to do everything manually. It's a little quicker and more automated on the BMC side, which makes things smoother for the end-users. 

The solution allows you to relay your issues to management, who in turn, can communicate them to our customers and programmers. It maintains a dialogue between all parties. It's had an overall positive impact on our process execution. 

We can set up automated email notifications to the programmers or the whole team for a particular job. It helps save time because we're not consistently looking at the job to see if it has ended or failed.

The Control-M interface makes delivering files in our data pipeline a little easier. The integration is so much more seamless, so the transition is a smoother experience.

I've been using Control-M for four years. 

The stability is fairly good. We haven't had any serious issues. 

The response time could be faster when you need a person to answer your questions. There are situations where availability becomes crucial. 

I wasn't involved in the deployment. Maintenance is handled by our unit team. They do updates and patching almost weekly.

I rate Control-M an eight out of ten. It comes down to preference and what you need. There are multiple platforms out there, but I've only used this software.  I recommend doing some research and seeking out a lot of opinions. Talk to other folks who worked with other solutions to get a grip and a better understanding. 

Control-M is used for file transfer and batch job scheduling.

Control-M provides a unified view where we can easily define, orchestrate, and monitor all application workflows and data pipelines. This is important because while running a robust environment, and managing and scheduling on individual servers are quite tedious. It has a centralized mechanism where it can schedule jobs on individual components within the environment. In this way, it helps with the ease of administration and achieving business requirements.

Control-M is used to integrate file transfers within the application workflows. Generally speaking, it has helped the business service delivery. For all applications, it has helped to notice bottlenecks, using its dashboard monitoring and alert mechanism. Therefore, immediate action can be taken in the case of failures. When compared to the traditional module or way of operating and scheduling, where the centralized monitoring alert mechanism is not available, Control-M helps in achieve having the application workflow run smoothly.

Control-M is useful to automate all critical and non-critical processes. Using Control-M, we can automate application workflows as well as file transfers involved in application workflows. We can also use it to run batches related to applications. Automating these processes reduces the RTO and RPO, which helps in the case of failures. It also helps to identify bottlenecks and take corrective measures.

1. File transfer.
2. It has an easy configuration. 
3. You don't need to create individual scripts for individual file transfer jobs. This reduces the load on the individual servers, when compared to a local task scheduler running on any OS.
4. The frequency at which it runs; it can be scheduled to run every minute. It is quite fast and quickly completes the job.
5. The online dashboard and job status. 
6. It has an alert mechanism for any failures.

These items are more useful when compared to the traditional way of doing or scheduling things.

It is on the web. This provides ease of administration, where we can manage the service from a central location. Also, can check or view all the jobs on a single dashboard, where we can manage and monitor them. 

In these three areas, I would like to see improvements in Control-M:

1. It is not giving us diagnostic logs during job runs. 
2. I would like them to beautify the dashboards, in terms of the number of jobs processed which have failed or are in progress. 
3. Control-M doesn't have any dynamic reporting facilities or features. 

I have been using it for about 1 year

If you implement Control-M, and configure it properly, it is quite stable. In the last year, BMC has been releasing a number of patches or updates to make it more stable. 

Initially, stability was not good. When BMC released quite a number of updates to fix some bugs, it became stable.

For any environment with about 80,000 of the jobs running per day, at least we require 10 people to monitor it and three people to administer it.

It is feasible to scale. We have not found any hiccups.

For an environment with about 80,000 jobs running per day, it requires at least 10 people to monitor it and three people to administer it.

Centralized monitoring and administration can be achieved

BMC support will be good level with more number or expertise available

BMC support is clueless on the new issues that arise. It seems like 90% of them are escalated to the R&D department, where they research and come back with a solution.

The guides or materials available are quite useful when exploring all the features.

No solution was used Previously, most of them use the traditional way of going through scripts.

Initially, the setup was a bit complex when trying to understand what all the features and settings do. However, when we explored it more, then we understood it and became comfortable with it.

Initial deployment took a couple of weeks. But once explored more the more convenient

The implementation is always with Control-M. Look at how to utilize all the features in Control-M, work out how to use them in subsequent reports, or while designing subsequent dataflows.

Work with BMC support for upgrades and for any issues encountered.

Looking at the rate of the usage, I can definitely see there is a gain. It is definitely profitable for any organization.

Control-M will help improve data transfers by approximately 80%. As an example, if you run any file transfer schedule in the local OS schedulers, compared to Control-M file transfer, Control-M will be better than the traditional schedulers. This is because of the number of features Control-M has and the frequency at which it runs. You can also choose the type of transaction data during a file transfer, which can be helpful for scheduling and troubleshooting.

Depends on business requirement

No other options available

I definitely recommend Control-M. It is quite stable, scalable, and the ease of administration is good as well.

Useful to automate batch scheduling. integrate within applications

Can be streamlined in data analytics applicaitons with Control-M.

I would rate Control-M as an eight out of 10.

The features most valuable differ from client to client. One of our clients used Control-M to execute multiple scripts in distributed systems and mainframe environments, which in turn ensured proper functioning of equipment, updating data, BI report, etc. over their multiple stores and distribution centre. Another client I worked with required mainly files to be transferred to third parties/vendors/internal businesses.

In all cases, Control-M was able to deliver it flawlessly, and also with add-on security features such as SSH connections and PGP encryption.

Control-M helped automate workloads, which would have taken hours and hours of effort and resources. The tool increased the quality and efficiency of work performed with as minimum manual effort as possible. It also reduced cost to the company by ensuring timely/effective/error-free delivery of tasks.

Control-M as a tool has provided a really stable and effective platform to automate workloads. However, sometimes we do have to use different job types to achieve one task. For this scenario a welcome addition would be an application integrator tool that is part of the Control-M product and can be used to combine multiple/variety of job types into one, allowing us to achieve the same result in one job.

Now, since this tool is something the users would have to define on their own, the pre-packaged or existing functionalities wouldn’t recognise the new template we would have designed, if you work on mass-updating a folder. So we end up having to individually pick out the AI jobs and update it. Understandably, as multiple users will have multiples ways of working with the tool, it would be difficult to pre-code something into the Control-M tool without knowing what will be developed by, say, a random coder in a different part of the world with a different business requirement.

Another aspect that always bothered me, as an administrator, was the Old bug out-New bug in conundrum regarding compatibility of the tool when a new version/FixPack was installed. We would have to then install patches to ensure compatibility. Some of the Control-M modules would need their own patches on EM side/server side, etc.

I have used it for over eight years now.

I have not encountered any stability issues. Control-M, as a tool, has been pretty stable. We did come across some compatibility or connectivity issues at times, which usually were resolved really quickly, as BMC’s wonderful tech team would have released a patch beforehand.

We did initially face some confusion with the GUI servers. What happens is, when you log in to the tool, it automatically picks up the last used GUI server and most of the users, who aren't schedulers or administrators, wouldn't have bothered to check that field or change it. So with more users logging in at the same time, we would have a huge load on the servers and the tool would hang or disconnect or wouldn't connect. We were able to fix it when we created multiple GUI servers to share the load, and some education for the users. :)

I remember another instance during my initial experience with Control-M. There used to be a delay with the NDP (New Day Procedure) as the number of jobs were really high, and it took around 45 minutes to 1.5 hours some days. I haven't seen this issue again, though, and since I didn't get to work in-depth with Control-M back then, I am not sure if that was in fact the tool or our servers having hung processes.

Another instance was when we accidentally had more jobs running at the same time (around 200K Control-M jobs) than what our servers could handle; it all came crashing down. I think it could have been something our servers weren't built to handle, as I did hear of some stories where the company ran 500K jobs at the same time (can't vouch for that story, or how it went for them though).

But these were mostly situational issues, and we were able to learn from it and quickly resolve it, find workarounds/solutions or better server management. So, when we built any new environment, we took all of these into account.

Technical support is excellent. They have a great support team. Also their AMIGO program is great, where you can engage BMC support for migration of your Control-M versions, if you need BMC expertise handy, and they do go through the complete process from start to finish, which is great.

I hadn't had a chance to work with any other solutions.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward, with all the necessary details mentioned in their well-written guides. They have guides for utilities, parameters, installation, administration, etc., which makes it easier to adapt for anyone who is new to the tool (of course, prior understanding of OS/DBs/networks/etc. is expected for you to understand it. ;) )

Control-M does come with a lot of features, but with those features comes the hefty price tag. :) It is reasonable comparatively to some tools that may only do, say, one type of the multiple tasks available in Control-M.

Most of the places I worked already had the solution in place, hence I cannot comment on this.

It is a great product and it will be worth it, if you plan to utilize it to its full potential and on a larger scale.

My client is one of the largest banks in Pakistan. They are using it for their international branches as well as for branches all over Pakistan. They have around 16 or 17 international branches in Gulf, North America, South Africa, Seychelles, and Singapore.

The operation window of our client is 24 hours. At different locations, they have to perform different activities. If you are working in a banking environment, the main activity is at the close of business, which is monitored by Control-M for all of their branches. Instead of having 20 people, now they have three to four people who are monitoring the tasks. Control-M is taking care of the close-of-business monitoring tasks, such as backups, etc.

It has multiple features. You can plan your execution in Control-M. It provides one single window where you can define workflows regardless of geographic boundaries and platforms. A batch process can be executed from this single window.

It provides insights into your processes. Your business people will know what process they are running and what is the state of the process. Instead of knowing that they're not going to meet the SLA the next morning, the business people immediately know the changes in their process.

Control-M is very easy. I can tell a non-technical person that this is how it works, and he would be able to easily understand it. Business people can understand the methodology of Control-M and the intuitive features that it has. It has a fantastic graphical user interface and is easy to understand. You just have to drag and drop but in a very intuitive way.

Monitoring features are also good. It has different color coding schemes, which can help you to understand the status of your workflow. An operator who is not that technical and is just monitoring the status of the application can see by color-coding the status of a process. If anything goes wrong or a process is stuck, it gives you a hint. You can just right-click and see the logs and the output. Even if the system is not right there in the data center and is located somewhere else, you can monitor it right from there and see the workflows.

A Control-M on-prem license is based on the number of jobs, which is the number of tasks a particular customer wants to have. These tasks have to be run within 24 hours window. For example, if you have a license for 100 jobs, you can run a maximum of 100 jobs in a 24-hour window. If your operations could not run 10 jobs, and they ran only 90 jobs, they just carry over to the next day, but the next day, they will have 110 jobs. Control-M asks you to buy those 10 more licenses because you were out of compliance in terms of the number of licenses. This is something that needs to be indicated in Control-M GUI so that customers know the number of licenses they're going to use in this time window. 

Their support and documentation should be improved. I am not that satisfied with their customer support. Sometimes, they don't have the answers. Their documentation is very poor. It is not well written, and it is not in a very logical manner.

You can use it on Unix, Linux, Windows, and AIX, but it needs some improvement on iSeries. It needs a built-in mechanism inside the system to give you an option to restore from the last point of failure. If a process crashes, the Control-M needs to have a mechanism in iSeries where the process can be restored from the last point of failure.

I have been using this solution for more than three years.

It is stable.

It is scalable. Its licensing is not based on the number of users. Its licensing is based on the number of tasks that you're using. You can have as many as 100 users, but in the environments that I have seen, there were between 10 to 20 users. You have administrators who can design the workflows, and you have operators who just monitor the results.

I am not that satisfied with their customer support. I would give them a 4 or 3.8 out of 5. Sometimes, they don't have the answers. 

Their documentation is not that clear. It is not well written, and it is not in a very logical manner. They just put information in the documentation, and you have to find things. It is not easy. If you are new to this product, you have to spend some time to understand what is it, and when you go to the documentation, most of the pages have a few lines, and then they ask, "Did it help?" It actually doesn't help. There is not much documentation, and it is not that clear. IBM products have very clear-cut, systematic, and guided activity sort of things on the website, whereas BMC's documentation is very poor. It is not that eloquent and clear.

It has some complexities because it is a complex environment. It has a three-tier environment on-prem, and one has to establish a secure connection between these entities, which is not easy. The first one is the master server console. The second one is the main engine that determines the scheduling process, and the third one is the agent. Agents have to be deployed on different client machines.

I would highly recommend this product. Its setup is complex, but once the setup is done, it hides away all the complexity. The end-user will have a very clear and intuitive interface to define the workflows. It is very easy to use.

I would rate Control-M an eight out of ten.

Our organization works with the cloud and databases. Our primary use case for Control-M is automating orchestration and scheduling jobs across the cloud and on-prem. We use it to monitor and report on jobs. We also use the index to integrate with the cloud service. It leverages our ability to manage workloads across various cloud platforms like AWS and GCP. 

Implementing Control-M saved us time by reducing our manual intervention. We can divert more resources to meaningful work. It reduced the amount of manual intervention needed by 30 to 35 percent. 

In addition to improving efficiency, workflow orchestration enhances our integration with other tools. We can orchestrate across on-prem and cloud environments and reliably create and integrate data pipelines. Workflow orchestration is critical to our DevOps. Control-M is constantly surveying the network.

The most valuable features of Control-M are automation and orchestration. It allows a different schedule, and we can manage thousands of jobs. It ensures we can complete them on time accurately. This automation reduces our manual intervention, significantly reducing error.

Control-M should receive more notice when it releases new features. The user interface is also a bit complex, and the navigation should be streamlined. 

I have used Control-M for a year and a half. 

I rate Control-M eight out of 10 for stability. 

I rate Control-M nine out of 10 for scalability. 

I rate Control-M support eight out of 10. 

Positive

We used Broadcom before switching to Control-M. The migration was a little complex.

Deploying Control-M is somewhat complex. It's easier to convert to the other tool. We spent more than two weeks on the deployment and received some support from the Control-M side. We had almost five teams of people working on it. First, we set up the environment. Then, we ran the installation and reconfigured the database. After that, we did functional and integration testing. 

Switching to Control-M reduced our total ownership cost.

Control-M isn't cheap, but this is an enterprise model. 

I rate Control-M nine out of 10. I will recommend it. It's easy to integrate and has the flexibility we need.