Control-M Reviews

We do scheduling of tasks and jobs in Control-M.

The company has had the product for over 25 years.

The opportunity to automate work so you have an audit trail, especially with governmental requirements in a regulated industry, such as the airline industry. It's really important that we have that audit trail.

Because it's a tool which allows us to do scheduled work, it allows for notifications when jobs aren't running within that scheduled time frame. This improves the opportunity to meet SLAs.

We have all sorts of things which run through it, both on distributed and mainframe platforms. They all seem to run quite successfully. We're looking to add some additional work off of distributed platforms that will run with Oracle types of processing. But, we have a lot of work to come to the tool that we're not using it for yet.

It creates an audit trail for jobs that we run off of it.

With opportunity to run things through a repository, such as a scheduler, you have a better opportunity to ensure the information is where it needs to be when it needs to be there.

The company has been working with BMC on the MFT. There are still some things about MFT which don't work the way that we want with our needs. So, we would like to see that improved.

While the solution has affected the collaboration between our development and operations within our company, there is a need and opportunity to further that relationship with the use of this tool, so the enterprise uses it on all platforms. We will get there, but we are just not there yet.

For our shop, the tool is 99.9 percent reliable. We have very few instances of disruption with the tool.

We don't have any complaints about the usability. We like what it does. There are no issues with usability of the tool.

As we increase the number of tasks or jobs on the system, there are concerns about cost.

We previously used CA products.

We have seen ROI. Our in-house developed tool has been able to use the Control-M platform, making it easier for us to manage and monitor our file delivery processes.

Control-M saves us time.

Because we have been so pleased with this product, I would encourage others to look into this product with a view on what are their needs. Ask the right questions of either their sales rep or technical person from BMC to understand how this tool would work successfully for them, because it's been so successful for us.

Because we've had it for so long, and it's been such a stable product, some of our folks on the distributed side of things need to learn how to use Control-M effectively in regards to output when tasks or jobs fail. They need to give us smarter outputs, so we can resolve things more quickly.

Control-M has a huge number of features, including:

• Cross-platform support
• Integration with applications such as Oracle, SAP, FTP, Hadoop, JMS, and many others.
• A GUI with various filter options that allows you to manage jobs from one screen.
• Add-ons such as BIM, Reporting Facility, and Forecast.
• Automated error handling allows you to define actions to be taken depending on the exit status of a job.
• Web-based and mobile applications allow you to manage Control-M from anywhere.

Before implementing Control-M, SAP or FTP related jobs were triggered using scripts. With Control-M, these jobs can be triggered using modules already integrated into Control-M, reducing team effort.

Also, Forecast and BIM give us a clear picture of batch job deadlines and alerts us of schedule overruns.

The cost of Control-M is a major factor. It is difficult for small-scale organizations to use Control-M as a solution.

I have been using Control-M for 10+ years and have no issues to date.

We have not encountered any stability issues. Control-M provides a highly stable environment. Fix packs are released regularly and immediately upon discovering bugs.

We did not encounter any scalability issues. Control-M can handle multiple servers, multiple cross-platform agents, and a large number of jobs easily.

BMC technical support is great. I rate it 10 out of 10. We have received immediate help with issues.

Previously, job scheduling was done internally using a SAP scheduler, Windows Task Scheduler, and cron. However, they all had limitations and we needed a single interface to handle different types of scheduling.

Initial setup and installation of Control-M does have challenges, but BMC has good technical support. Related documentation is also available online. Once you are familiar with these, setup becomes straightforward.

Pricing is somewhat on high side. But it’s recommended for bigger organizations.

We evaluated AutoSys and IBM Tivoli Workload Scheduler, but they didn’t offer anything close to the functionality that Control-M offers.

If you need a one-stop solution for all your automation needs, Control-M is your answer.

Scheduling of the workflows: We had to run a few thousand scripts on a daily, weekly, monthly, semiannual, and annual basis. Without this tool, scheduling would have been really difficult. This tool also helps in documenting the runs, which would further enable us to check for defects.

It has made execution of workflows simple, especially batch runs.

We had to migrate from an E2 to an E3 framework, where we manually had to change the name of more than 1,000 instances in a batch. This could have been easy if it was automated, such as searching for a keyword and replacing it with the desired name. In BMC Control-M, this facility is only available for the file path and connection.

I have used it for two years.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is 7/10. I faced an issue in which the connection was lost in the middle of a run. It was a small batch, so I managed it by rerunning it. I contacted tech support on a weekend, because I had to run a weekly batch. I didn’t see much of an immediate response from them, but they were able to sort out the issue a little later.

I have used this since I joined my current company.

Initial setup was straightforward.

It is worth the price.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options.

It is definitely a good tool in the business intelligence domain, which can be used for small or big batch runs.

We use this solution for enterprise workload automation in the financial industry. We schedule and monitor hundreds of business-critical processes.

We also leverage the Managed File Transfer capabilities of Control-M to handle our file transfers securely & efficiently. Most of our tasks also deal with databases, and Control-M's purpose-built module for the databases comes in very handy when handling database components. It adds value with its capability to execute tasks natively and bring more information to the output.

The BIM feature is used to monitor the important set of jobs as a service and to proactively alert operations when it sees that some jobs in the critical path are failed or delayed. This helps a lot in maintaining our SLAs efficiently.

Control-M, with its huge integration capabilities, brought most of our scheduling activities under one roof. This adds to ease of use and support. To top that, the visibility it adds to the otherwise hidden information is very useful. In fact, invaluable.

Although we do not use tens of additional plugins available, we can see how they can be valuable to other companies.

BMC has now started concentrating more on APIs, which is a welcome move. This enables us to develop 'job as code'. This supports our efforts to adapt to a Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery model. We hope that they make it one hundred percent compatible as early as possible.

Integration capabilities, plugins, support communities, visibility, MFT, Reports, APIs. As mentioned earlier, all these features mean that we don't need to use multiple solutions to do the task. It also makes things a lot easier that way.

MFT changed the way we manage our file transfers. On top of that, all of it is directly visible in the same GUI. All the statistics can be viewed at the click of a button. Although a bit flaky sometimes, it is very helpful.

Experts in the communities need a special mention here. There's a huge number of people who spend their valuable time helping each other, solving others problems. Although the actual BMC support can be slow in response sometimes, the expertise & the helpful nature of people in the BMC Community for Control-M more than make up for it.

MFT needs some more polishing. We ran into problems a few times & struggled to get them sorted in time. But, BMC gave their full support to us at such times.

APIs are not there one hundred percent yet, but BMC just adopted a monthly release mechanism for APIs. I can see that they are on it full time.

Inbuilt integration with Connect Direct could be helpful. A developer sandbox could be very helpful to try out new features or experience them.

Application Integrator can be helpful, although I don't see many templates being built by BMC experts. The hub that is available is mostly user-dependent.

It's stable ninety-nine percent of the time. Even the other one percent could be because of the funky underlying infrastructure/network setup.

Our job footprint is very low, so we never faced any scalability issues. From the documentation, it is my understanding that virtually, there is no limit to its scalability.

It can be slow at times, but you eventually come to an understanding that as long as you provide all of the information they 'might' need as early as possible, there are better chances that you get your answers 'sooner'.

I had used Cron scheduler for a short time, but it can be considered almost zero experience. My understanding is that BMC Control-M is years ahead in terms of usability & visibility.

The initial setup of this solution is very straight forward. BMCs AMIGO program is there to walk you through the process.

It gets a bit technical when you need to setup MFTs, but at the same time, it's not rocket science either.

We performed the deployment in-house with help from BMCs AMIGO program.

Pricing is a tricky area that I don't have much experience in. I can see it getting even trickier with more companies moving to a cloud-based infrastructure.

We did not evaluate other options before choosing this solution.

I like this solution, and my advice is to go for it :)

It automates operations for all parts of the company. There isn't a part of the company that doesn't have jobs scheduled for Control-M.

The amount of work that gets done. We execute probably up to a million jobs a day. With Control-M, there is visibility into it. There are notifications when things go wrong. I don't think our company could run without it.

I am sure it has improved application reliability and SLAs.

Monitoring is a valuable aspect of it. The monitoring tool is very good, and it is easy for expert and entry level users to use on a short notice.

The reporting tool still needs a lot of improvement. It was supposed to get better with the upgrade, and it really didn't get better. Its reporting aspects are poor, and management always wants to know things. It is sort of hard to get at tangible numbers without doing a lot of additional work outside of the system. It needs help, because it's such a useful thing to have. It needs to be more powerful and easier to use.  

Our users always want access to the database directly, so they can do their own queries and pull their own data. However, there really isn't a tool that we can give them that does what they want, and we don't give access to our production database. Although, in our new infrastructure, we are setting it up so we have a mirrored one where they can run queries, because there has been so much demand. Though, it would be nice if there was a tool within Control-M so people wouldn't be asking for this.

I don't want to have to reach out to a third-party application company to do automated notifications of any form. Right now, we still have people manually calling people and emailing people. They should have built-in integration for better notifications using an API, similar to what xMatters offers.

The stability varies a bit. There are bugs that we run across. There are some issues that we have. However, when you think about the amount of work that it does within the company, it runs a million things a day, and it pretty much works. I'm not up in the middle of the night every night with problems. Overall, it's very stable, but it's not immune to problems. Considering the amount of work that it does, the problems that it has are very small.

The last upgrade took us three years. Up until the current version that we are about to go into, you had to build out a whole new infrastructure, then extract data and put it back in place. Now, it's a huge improvement, as upgrades do not need to build out a whole new infrastructure. 

We are probably one of the largest users of Control-M due to the amount of work that it does for us, and we could have it doing more. We are currently upgrading it.

We haven't had any serious outages in quite a long time, even through the large growth that we have had. We've doubled the work in the last year and a half to two years, and it's handled it seamlessly. 

Most of the time, we don't get the answers that we are looking for from the technical support. That is why we use a consultant company.

Sometimes, it's very good, and sometimes not. We have mixed feelings. It used to be better.

Oracle Database backup teams used to do this all themselves via cron. Now, they have automated cron to Control-M for a lot of our database backups where they used to do this outside of Control-M. Other than that, I think everybody is using it.

The initial upgrade setup (for basic functionality) is not difficult.

I would like a simpler setup. We have had some challenges implementing, having to play with some different settings. In order to get it to do what was wanted of it, not alerting too often nor giving false alarms, it takes a bit of setup. Maybe something a little easier to use for setup would be nice.

We've been using a consultant, for the last two upgrades, which first came to us through BMC Professional Services. Now, we use them directly and are very happy with them. Because there is not enough internal staff at our company for Control-M to do day-to-day and upgrading, we bring in help.

It has to save us time. Instead of 800 applications internally doing their own thing, it centralizes everything into one location where notifications, etc., take the power of economies of scale into one central point of focus. So, it saves us money for us and our customers, whose jobs we are scheduling.

We have a five-year contract with task-based licensing.

We had another solution in-house because it came to us through an acquisition of some business. So, I dealt with a title scheduler for a couple of years. It was different. It was not as scalable, robust, and more difficult.

I would recommend it for the scalability and dependability. The software is constantly being improved and new add-ons are being created. It is a robust tool that's stable. It is well-supported, especially compared to a lot of other options out there.

We have had massive growth in the last year to two because of company acquisitions. We have added a lot of big data aspect processing and a lot of other processing. It has handled this quite well.

We are just starting to go into a bit of the DevOps, Workload Change Manager, and Helix Chatbox.

Even though we don't chose to use their wide scope of products, it is one of the things that is a real positive about BMC. They can handle everything a corporation could throw at it, which makes the experience of working with them a lot better.

We learn things everyday about the product and its available features. We work in an IT environment with inquisitive people. There are millions of options available, parameter-wise, within the system. I learn something new everyday by working around smart, intuitive people.

Self Service for repeatable, low impact workload automation processes. BIM for SLA management. GUI client for visibility into the enterprise schedule. New to v9, the automatic Agent upgrade features have been quite helpful too. Relatively easy to perform upgrades and fix packs.

Offers a single pane of glass to our enterprise batch\workload automation environment. Allows us to empower business users to execute their own processes on demand through Self Service. We're able to proactively predict system availability thanks to BIM. Our 24/7 staff have all the right utilities to monitor and manage the schedule.

Advanced File Transfer (AFT) has limitations that cause us to use a bit more licensing than we feel is appropriate.

Almost 13 years.

No

Not usually.

No.

9/10 - Everything is typically great with customer service.

8/10 - After getting through the basics with lower level support, we tend to get problems resolved after proving our issue is "real" and we get put in contact with a technical SME.

We've used other stand-alone products that have their own scheduler while we've owned Control-M but have migrated away from that model to give ourselves the best visibility to the enterprise environment. We've broken down the silo and migrated all scheduling into Control-M.

We've been using the product for quite a long time, so reviewing initial setup wouldn't be applicable to current times. I feel the setup of v9 is quite straightforward.

In-house.

BMC does NOT have a great licensing model from my perspective.

We've evaluated many other products along the way... Just about every other major competitor in the market.

The main use is for job scheduling. We are using Control-M to manage and schedule various jobs within our organization.

We are more comfortable with Control-M since we have people who know this tool well. It integrates seamlessly with other tools within our ecosystem.

The best aspects of the solution are the ecosystem and integration part. This makes Control-M particularly valuable for us.

Control-M could benefit from incorporating AI features for better job scheduling. For example, if a job fails, the system could automatically manage related failures and take remedial actions without manual intervention. This would make it more advanced.

I have been using Control-M in my current organization for the last six months.

We did not face any stability issues with Control-M. It has been very stable for our needs.

Scalability is very subjective to use cases. For our minimalistic use cases, Control-M is quite scalable. However, for larger use cases, such as those in banking where there are thousands of jobs, scaling might be different.

Customer support from BMC is good but not excellent. We always expect more from support, so I would rate it between three to nine on a scale of one to ten.

Positive

Before Control-M, there might have been an IBM scheduling tool in use. I am unsure why the switch happened as I have only seen Control-M being used since I joined.

The initial setup was straightforward. It did not require much effort as we had knowledgeable people in the team.

One person is generally enough for the installation and configuration parts. It typically takes around one day to complete the installation.

We found Control-M to be one of the best solutions available. I would recommend incorporating AI features for future improvements.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

We use this solution to automate batch processing, create automated workflows to support various applications, and integrate various endpoints in the workflow to support business processes.

File transfer between our company and partner is critical for us. MFT has provided this solution and we are now using MFT for internal and external file transfers.

With version 9.0.18, which included new features, it has increased the usage of Control-M.

Introduction of Control-M-managed file transfer has increased usage in our organization. BIM is a good tool to monitor SLAs, and being a financial organization, this is a very good feature for us.

The most valuable feature is the Autoedit variable resolution in planning. This feature allows developers to better understand the schedule, and allow them to correct any potential issues in advance.

The MFT dashboard is also a useful tool to track all file transfers. It provides detailed information about both source and destination.

Control-M MFT and Control-M API both need improvement.

The Control-M MFT has to support checksums for FTP transfer between our own Control-M agents.

The Control-M API does not support SQL database-type jobs, where a job has been configured to use the SQL catalog to locate SSIS.

BIM needs further improvement to include any dynamic-type jobs with the workflow.

The support and bug fix timeline need improvement.

Technical support for this solution needs to be improved.

We did not use another solution prior to this one.

We did not evaluate other options before choosing this solution.