Fortra's JAMS Reviews

We use Fortra's JAMS to schedule jobs.

JAMS agents are instrumental in supporting our growth and scalability.

We have been using JAMS for eight years, and the majority of its benefits were realized early on. However, it remains a valuable scheduling software that consolidates our over 500 jobs into a single platform. JAMS allows us to clearly organize our tasks for the data warehouse, web, and other applications. While we could run these jobs independently, JAMS provides a structured approach that simplifies management and reduces manual overhead.

JAMS helps centralize job management on all of our platforms and applications. This is crucial, and it is the reason we still use JAMS.

JAMS has enabled the IT team to allocate more time to other tasks. Without JAMS, job automation would consume significantly more of our resources.

JAMS has also helped us free up a moderate amount of time by making it easier to troubleshoot stalled jobs.

The dashboard is intuitive.

The error messages from JAMS need clarification, hindering our ability to resolve issues swiftly.

The JAMS client requires attention. Its behavior can be erratic, and certain features lack intuitiveness. For instance, the search function, while powerful, is not user-friendly and can be challenging to master. The overall user interface also needs refinement.

The JAMS report viewer can be improved and needs a lot of work.

We have been using Fortra's JAMS for eight years.

The upgraded JAMS system has significantly improved stability compared to its previous versions. Before the upgrade (last year), we were experiencing frequent issues due to the system's age. However, since the update, performance has been much more reliable.

It scales very well

The technical support response time is good but the quality of the response varies.

Positive

In my previous organization, we used Jenkins, a powerful continuous integration and continuous delivery tool. While I cannot definitively compare it to JAMS, I found Jenkins' user-friendly interface and extensive integrations with various backend systems significantly streamlined our development processes. Unfortunately, my experience with Fortra's licensing and sales practices was less favourable. I have concerns about the company's integrity, particularly following their recent changes to our licensing arrangement, which seemed to be implemented in bad faith. Such actions raise questions about their trustworthiness and future intentions, leaving me uncertain about what to expect from them.

In our complex environment, the initial setup for someone with no JAMS experience would be difficult, but it would be straightforward in a simple environment.

When we upgraded JAMS last year, we purchased the consulting services from Help Systems.The consultant assigned to us was excellent.

Fortra's JAMS pricing structure has deteriorated significantly since its acquisition by Fortra. Previously, both Help Systems and MVP offered more favorable pricing and licensing terms. However, Fortra's current pricing and licensing practices are unnecessarily complicated far less customer friendly. In addition to standard licensing fees, numerous additional costs are associated with using JAMS. Fortra's approach of charging for seemingly minor components, such as separate agents and schedulers, is frustrating and adds to the overall cost of ownership.

I would give Fortra's JAMS a rating of five out of ten. While the software is excellent, my experience with the company could have been better. As a result, I would not consider purchasing any other Fortra products in the future.

We have two JAMS users in our organization.

JAMS is a technically powerful tool, but it has a learning curve for new users. It's crucial to understand the user interface and how agents communicate with the back-end system. Before connecting JAMS to other applications, it's important to familiarize yourself with its capabilities. For example, some scripts can be executed directly within JAMS, allowing you to create jobs using JAMS' features before relying on external scripts. However, debugging failed JAMS jobs can be time-consuming due to the complexity of the logs. Once you've mastered it, JAMS functions effectively, though the licensing structure is a notable caveat.

We exchange files on a nightly basis with vendors.

 The ability to protect the data we exchange against cybersecurity threats varies depending on the type of data being exchanged. 

We have a student information system (SIS) for education. We have 50 school districts that run on the same database, and they all can run reports through the GUI. JAMS manages the reports. We have a throttle so that they don't overpower the system. So, the stuff comes through the system and the throttle manages it, and then if there's a certain report that runs over, we can kill it. They can run it again with better parameters. That's pretty much the main use. We have a lot of nighttime jobs that we schedule through that as well.

It's deployed on our private cloud. We run our own server. In terms of its version, we're on the most recent version.

If JAMS has a deadlock, we get a notification. When there's a deadlock, it'll kill the job. If something runs too long, it kills it. We also have a throttle, which also helps the whole system to work. If we didn't have the throttle, it would be bedlam. It would be crazy. 

It absolutely helps to eliminate data slack across the applications. It'll kill jobs; it'll kill deadlocks faster; and it'll kill long-running queries. We can get in there, and where the software doesn't allow us to kill the job, we can get into the SQL Server, but JAMS is much cleaner, and more people can get into it without having to expose the database access to people. We can give them JAMS access where they can kill the job.

It saves time when troubleshooting stalled jobs because of the fact that more people can get into it without having the access to the backend. 

It has 100% helped to free up the IT staff’s time. Previously, there used to be two or three of us for monitoring, but now, we've boiled it down just to me. I get the notifications, and I handle them. It has absolutely reduced staff time.

The overall product is fantastic. I love it. It has been a fantastic, solid product. If I have one tiny bit of a problem with it, the support team gets in touch with me right away. I don't know if I've had another service that has been as fantastic as the JAMS support team. 

I would like a simple web interface that I could give to my team to go in and kill jobs or see why jobs died so that we don't have to drill down deeper into the application and know everything about it. It would be good to have a really clean web engine that would say here are the jobs running.  We can then click to see the time running and whether any of them fails and other similar things. I know they have one, but it's not very simplistic. It would be awesome to have a simple one. 

I have been using this solution for about 15 years.

It's 110% rock solid. JAMS has never failed us. It has been rock solid.

We only use it for one thing. I don't have any input on its scalability because we don't use it for anything else. We only use it on one platform. So, there's no centralization. We have one main application. It has the front end, the back end, the middleware, and all that jazz. All the jobs to maintain the software are run through JAMS.

We probably use the simplest features of JAMS. We have no complex code-driven things.

I would rate them a 10 out of 10. They get back to you faster than your mom will call you back. When we've had problems, such as if I've had a job that keeps on failing and then I say, "Here's the error code, and I don't know why it's failing," they're right back. They are fantastic. Although I haven't contacted them in probably a year, when we first started up, our software code was sketchy or a little weak, and it failed. JAMS was right there when we had problems with scheduling things. They were fantastic. Their support is amazing. The product is solid. It's as solid as it can be.

Positive

JAMS was our first and only one. I know they did a lot of research on it, and they picked JAMS. The whole state uses it. They picked it, and we didn't know. We didn't come from anybody, and we aren't going to anybody, that's for sure.

I've installed it many times. It's simple as a pie. With a few clicks, you are done. It gets done as fast as you can click. It's very simple. As long as you have all the parameters, a database, and your web front end, it's super easy.

Our licensing is pretty cheap because we have a state solution. So, we pay only $1,000 a year. 

We're a software provider for school systems. We are state-owned. There are 13 of us throughout Ohio, and we have a collective agreement with JAMS or a collective licensing through JAMS. Because we have so many licenses, we get a discount on the renewal, etc.

I would absolutely recommend it to anybody. If you don't give it a try, you're a fool. At least give it a try because you'll find that it's an easy install. It's an incredibly easy management tool to go around. The setup wizards are nice. It's a little slow on some of the history look-ups, and I don't know why. Other than that, it's very clean with a good front end and easy manageability.

In terms of helping us to be aware of and handle common issues that can prevent our jobs from running, we haven't had anything. It will kill a job if there's a deadlock, and obviously, we get notifications if there are bad parameters in the job run, but I don't have any notifications about not running because of permissions, low resources, or anything like that. We don't have that kind of thing set up.

I would easily rate it a 10 out of 10. With the stability and the support, to me, every day, it's a 10.

We use Fortra's JAMS for scheduled tasks. We have over 100 virtual servers, and JAMS allows us to manage scheduled tasks from a single location. This means that we can create jobs and run them on any of those 100 servers. For example, we can create one job to reboot a specific server at a specific time, or we can create a job to reboot multiple servers at the same time. Once the reboot is complete, we can create chain jobs to kick off other steps, such as running a script or sending an email notification.

We have not had many problems with Fortra's JAMS. I think most of the issues have been due to trial and error. A lot of it depends on us, the users, to make sure our code is correct when we create commands. We need to make sure that all of the information is accurate. We have to double- and triple-check our code to ensure there are no issues that will prevent jobs from running.

Fortra's JAMS helps make our lives easier by allowing us to automate tasks.

Fortra's JAMS helps us centralize the management of all our platforms and applications. This is important because it allows us to manage all of our systems from a single location. Previously, we had over 100 virtual servers, each with its own set of scheduled tasks. This meant that we had to log in to each server individually to view and manage the tasks. With JAMS, we can simply open the client and view all of our jobs in one place. This saves us a lot of time and effort.

JAMS' code-driven automation is highly effective in handling more complex scheduling environments.

JAMS saves us an hour of time when troubleshooting stalled jobs. 

JAMS helps to free up our IT staff's time.

Being able to create a series of chained jobs, which are basically linked jobs is valuable. This means that we can schedule a server restart at 2 a.m. Once the restart is complete, we can have the job trigger another job that will send us an email notification. Then, we can have that job trigger another job that runs some SQL statements or Power BI queries. We can continue to chain jobs together in this way.

As an admin, I would like to have a web-based GUI instead of a client application that we have to install on our PCs. Many applications are moving to web-based GUIs, so it would be convenient if we could use JAMS without having to install a client on our machines. We could simply go to our local servers or website and manage everything from there.

I have been using Fortra's JAMS for almost three years.

We have not had any problems with JAMS. It has never crashed for us. If we have any issues, it is because of some of our PowerShell code or another error.

JAMS is highly scalable and could be used for a lot more than what we are currently using it for. We just haven't had the time to invest in it to actually use it properly.

The technical support has been excellent. They have always responded promptly and in a timely manner. We have never had to wait for answers.

Positive

We previously used the built-in Windows task scheduler before migrating the jobs into JAMS.

The initial setup was really straightforward and easy. I didn't run into any problems from a setup point of view. 

One person was required for the deployment.

We completed the implementation ourselves in-house with some clarification about some settings from JAMS.

We have seen a return on investment with Fortra's JAMS.

The pricing of JAMS has not been an issue for us, as it has allowed us to save time. This makes it a cost-effective product.

I would rate Fortra's JAMS nine out of ten.

Five people are using JAMS in our organization.

Fortra's JAMS is a great cost-effective solution for automating daily tasks, such as rebooting a server, running PowerShell commands, executing SQL queries, and generating SQL statements. It can do virtually anything.

We started with basic tasks because we were bringing things over from Windows Task Scheduler. We didn't have a whole lot of dependencies at that point. We have gotten much more detailed in our scheduling requirements since. We use what are currently called JAMS Setups, which in the new version are called Sequence Jobs, quite a bit, especially for our enterprise data analytics team. We do some pretty complex scheduling scenarios.

We also use it for holiday calendars that impact our scheduling and for multiple regular scenarios, such as dependencies on a file or another job or another Setup. 

Overall, we use it for basic, normal enterprise-scheduling solutions.

We've been able to automate a lot of processes that were done manually before. We're not a huge company, and we're a fairly new company, so a lot of things were being done before in Task Scheduler or in a homegrown solution called Batch Nucleus. They were also in cron and in SaaS. They were all over the place. Being able to consolidate all of that into this one enterprise scheduling solution allows us to put dependencies on different jobs between different systems. It also allows us to monitor everything from one place and gives us the ability to do some exception handling. We have unlimited licensing with JAMS and we have hundreds of environments that we have agents on and do testing on. Having one location that we can monitor everything from, and handle all the exceptions from, is critical.

We've automated our critical processes, which used to be done manually through an external product and that means we don't have to worry quite so much about manual, human error.

Because we have gone from a lot of manual processes to automated processes with JAMS, we have been able to free up IT staff time. We're not spending 30 minutes doing something manually that JAMS can do in five minutes. It has freed up IT resources, but it has also sped up our processing times. For just the Technical Operations Center team that I manage, it has saved about 20 hours a week.

JAMS has also helped eliminate “data slack” across our applications. All of our enterprise data analytics is done through JAMS, so being able to access things like Teradata, Hadoop, and Snowflake cloud solutions for data integration is important. Our company is based on data. Everything we do is data-driven, so it has been very valuable having one place where we can process all of the data and do batch schedules with chunks of data. It's been a good tool for that. Having current data ready to go when our users need it is extremely critical because we are a FinTech company. We have to be able to pull data instantaneously to make decisions. Otherwise, our customer base is reduced and there are also compliance issues. We have both financial and legal obligations to our partner companies, so that data has to be up-to-date and ready to go when they request it.

I've used a lot of the other scheduling packages in the past. The most valuable feature of JAMS is the ease of being able to update parameters on-the-fly. Also, their monitoring and historical views are pretty robust.

We are also able to go into a job that is inside of a Setup and say, "Turn this one off for a while," by using the Except clause.

Another useful functionality is being able to pass parameters and variables between different jobs, and different steps in a job, or a Setup.

JAMS handles exceptions fairly well but there are some areas where it might improve a little bit. It has to do with being able to automatically handle exceptions, out-of-the-box, rather than having to code them. I'd also like to be able to do different things, based on what the actual exception is. In our current version, there's a placeholder where you should be able to do some things along those lines, but we've never actually been able to get it to work. I've seen in the 7.x versions that that has been fixed.

In terms of automation, there are some scenarios that we're still working on trying to automate and we just haven't been able to find an applicable solution through JAMS for those yet. I'm excited to see, once we get to that point, if we can do those things in the newer version.

I started using JAMS in June of 2016. I was in charge of taking all of our disparate scheduling systems and converting everything into the JAMS scheduling package. I have used it from the ground up.

Right now we're on-prem, but we are going to want to go to the cloud sometime next year.

In the five years that I have worked on JAMS, I have never had it crash.

The fat client on your machine, for the 6.5 version, is not really reliable. It can slow down and it can get hung and you have to restart it. But with JAMS itself, the only issues we've had were when we didn't get the license key updated on time. For the most part, JAMS has been a very steady, reliable tool.

Because we have unlimited licensing, it has been extremely scalable for us. We can put agents on whatever servers and environments that we need to, fairly quickly and easily. We now have that set up as an automated process. So it's extremely scalable, based on the pricing model and how many agents you're allowed.

Technical support is an area in which JAMS has come a long way. When I first started with them, they didn't have any kind of training. The way it worked was that if we had a question, we would call their support team and there might be some back-and-forth trying to figure out how to get what we needed. But they now have JAMS University where you can go to a boot camp and learn more about the product. 

And their support is pretty good and pretty responsive. They get back to you fairly quickly and they usually have a good solution to whatever your issue is. And while they have generally been responsive, there have been several times when getting an answer has taken several weeks, instead of being able to get a really quick answer. I would rate JAMS support at seven out of 10, but I wouldn't give more than an eight for the support for any product that I've worked with. That makes a seven a high mark, for me.

Neutral

We spun off from another company, and that other company used Control-M. When we went our own way, we didn't bring Control-M with us. The scheduling solutions that we were using before were Task Scheduler, a homegrown solution, and SQL Server Agent jobs, things that aren't necessarily true enterprise scheduling solutions.

In our migration to JAMS, we had to refactor some of the code, but that's because of the way that it was coded before. SQL Server Agent and Task Scheduler were pretty easy to migrate because there is actually a conversion routine where you can log in to a machine from JAMS and just say, "Go pull the job and convert it." It would automatically convert it, and we would just have to do some cleanup. That part was easy. But when it came to some of our other stuff, we pretty much had to build it from scratch.

I was the only person working on the migration back then, so it took about a year and a half to get everything over, but a lot of that was because we were having to go find things that were being scheduled on these other boxes. Some 80 percent of it was done within the first four to six months.

JAMS is close to the lower end of the pricing models for enterprise scheduling solutions. They are much cheaper than Control-M, as well as some other products that I've used.

I also don't know of another solution where you can actually get true, unlimited licensing, where you can have as many instances and as many agents as you want. That has been a godsend for us because we have environments that we spin up and take down on-demand. There are times when we have hundreds of environments going at one time. Having that lower-cost model has been really good for us, while still being able to get the functionality that we need from the tool.

Maintenance and additional features are all included in the yearly cost, and that cost is still much cheaper than what you would pay for maintenance for another product.

The one that I had used most recently, and the longest, was BMC Control-M. It is an extremely robust product that has the ability to do some things that our current version of JAMS cannot do. For example, Control-M has the ability to truly diagram out what the flow looks like, from within the tool. My understanding, after having talked to my scheduling analyst, is that that feature is coming up in a future version of JAMS, which is cool.

Control-M also has the ability to do batch impact analysis, and to put a job at the end of a job flow that says that if anything in the job flow breaks, provide an alert. JAMS has the functionality to do that in the current version, but you have to code it. If you want to say, "If this job fails, I want this other job to run to fix it, and then come back and do this other job," you have to code it. But I believe, again, in the newer versions, it's easier to do that type of flow by using Sequence Jobs. That's the biggest area where I felt JAMS really needed to improve, in automatically handling issues, and they've come a long way.

Control-M enables you to send different types of notifications based on the output, which is also a feature that's coming up in the 7.0 version of JAMS.

JAMS has taken quite a few of the recommendations that we gave them and has built them into their newer versions of JAMS. It has been an exciting journey for us to be able to have a lot of input into how the product works.

I'm really excited that we're trying to upgrade to the 7.x version, because it's so much better. But it's a huge change to go from the 6.0 version to the 7.0 version. The tool looks completely different. It works differently, with different ways to do things, so there is a big learning curve. Since our developers build their own jobs in the lower-level environments, it's going to be a big learning curve for our entire company to start using the most current version.

We've defined our complex scheduling scenarios the way that JAMS works in our current version, but in the future version that's going to be much easier. That version has the ability to create multiple schedules on the same job, instead of having multiple jobs with different schedules doing the same thing.

In terms of the upgrade process, we have multiple instances, including development, stage, and production. We've been trying to build a test environment and we have been doing a lot of our tests there. For our actual cut-over and conversion to the newest version, we are being told that we can actually upgrade in-place, instead of having to do a conversion of our database. We're going to take a two- to three-week freeze on any scheduling updates and on adding anything new. Then we'll convert our development instance and train all of our developers on how to use it and what the differences are. We'll let them test. Then we'll upgrade our stage environment and let them test on that. As soon as all of that looks good, we'll do an upgrade of our production system.

We will be working with HelpSystems on the upgrade when we get a little bit closer to it. At this point we're still trying to figure out exactly when we're going to be able to do it. But we have asked them multiple questions and gotten a lot of good feedback from them.

In terms of saving time when troubleshooting stalled jobs, JAMS could do that. But we don't have all of our code set to send the output from a job back to JAMS. So in a lot of instances, we're still having to dig into the system, like Informatica, to get that log back and find out what's wrong. That is something that we, as a company, need to improve. It's not a lack of functionality on the part of JAMS.

We have batch processes that run either on-demand or on a scheduled basis. JAMS is used to manage and run those jobs.

We have realized significant savings in manpower. There's no need for operators to be submitting jobs manually, as it is automated. And the ability to chain a whole bunch of sequences or steps, again, results in labor savings.

It gives us a single pane of glass that allows us to see what is going on and that centralizes the management of jobs on all our platforms. We use it both in a production and non-production environment. We're certainly getting a lot of benefits from that.

And data is ready to go when our users need it, due to the fact that it's scheduling jobs and running them as quickly as the backend systems allow.

Another advantage is that the monitor interface gives very good information, good visuals that are color-coded so that you can quickly jump to where an issue is. That helps save time when troubleshooting jobs. In terms of our IT staff's time, JAMS is probably saving us a few hours a day.

One of the things I like the most, as a SQL DBA, is the fact that we can manipulate tables in the background. Also, the fact that you can have your own views and work with the product the way it fits best is a very helpful feature.

There are alerts if things fail, and we do have that functionality in place. For critical jobs, we also have notification that the job has run successfully. And JAMS is very good at handling exceptions. You can do retries.

In the version that we are using, it does validations when you try to delete an object and if there are any dependencies in place, the deletion process will not proceed for obvious reasons. However, there is no information provided as to what it was that caused the validation to fail. Where is that dependency? Right now, it's quite a tedious process to find which object is getting in the way. Getting information with details of the failure would be very helpful.

Also, sometimes the interface is slow. It will lock up the application for no apparent reason.

I've been using Fortra's JAMS for five-plus years.

It's a stable product. We've rarely experienced bugs or glitches.

It's also a scalable solution.

We have it in extensive use. We have hundreds of jobs that run on a daily basis, both in production and non-production environments. There are no plans at this point to expand our use. There simply is no need to have more jobs running. That said, we are in the process of doing an upgrade from 6.5 to 7, but there is no increase in the number of jobs planned.

I was not at the organization when the initial setup happened. 

In terms of training, we do not have formal training for JAMS. For the operators, it is really a handoff. It is quite intuitive for them. For admins, there is obviously a lot more to the product.

We have definitely seen ROI. It's a great labor-saving tool. The hours that would be required to manually submit and monitor these jobs would be quite significant if we did not have an automation solution in place.

The way that we have it licensed is by the number of jobs. We have two installations and there probably could be a little bit more flexibility in terms of moving licenses between one and the other. However, our situation is that we have one that is a production license and another that is a non-production license, so that may be the issue.

We have five hands-on users of JAMS including two admins and three operators who monitor and release jobs on an as-needed basis. The admins are the ones involved in maintenance, not that they're necessarily needed for maintenance, but they are the ones capable of doing whatever needs to be done.

I would definitely recommend it. Note that there is a learning curve, so you should go in with a plan. But it is highly flexible and very valuable.

We run application software for auto finance companies, banks, and the auto company's financial departments. We use JAMS to schedule all the nightly and repetitive batch processing. We run around 10,000 jobs per day.

We've had batch schedulers before. We’ve had CA7 on the mainframe. Our on-premise data center had another product. They were a little more cryptic and not as intuitive to look at. We couldn’t figure out what to do. In JAMS, we can figure out whatever we need to do pretty easily. It has a really good user interface and straightforward scheduling functionality.

JAMS is easy to use. We came up with various scenarios for scheduling. With a little bit of thought, we figured it out and implemented it pretty simply. Calendars, building new jobs, and crisscrossing dependencies are easy to update. If something fails, we can rerun it or skip it with just a couple of mouse clicks. The information displayed on the monitor is very informative. I have a team of 24/7 operators. The team members watch it run and make sure everything's on time. If anything fails, they address it. The product is pretty good for them. It’s pretty easy. I like the solution overall.

The product does not allow the users to cut and paste the job names from the screen.

I have been using the solution for three to four years.

I haven’t experienced any stability issues in the solution.

We're running ten thousand jobs and haven't had any capacity issues. We don’t have it on the busiest server. I'm sure we could run it on a larger server, and it would get even faster. However, it seems to be doing well, and we keep adding to it every day. The operations staff are the users.

I had an amazing experience with the technical support team. The team members respond right away. They answer the phone usually without going into a queue. Their support is amazing. That is one of the key reasons why we selected JAMS.

Positive

We were using AutoSys on-premise. We didn't really do a full POC. Once we had the demos and compared the features, we decided to go with JAMS. Since it was the first thing we were doing in the cloud, the testing was like a POC. The whole environment was brand new.

The migration wasn’t difficult. We have documentation on all our jobs. It was just a matter of building them out. Once we finish a few jobs, we can clone what we've done and make minor tweaks for the next one. It's pretty easy.

It took us a little less than three months to choose the product and start using it. There was a lot of discussion about how to build the firewalls between servers and get access to the servers that we would put the agents on. All of that was new to us. It took us a little bit longer than someone who already has that established and is just swapping one tool for the other.

Everything is in the Azure cloud. We have three instances. One instance is for DR, one for prod, and one for non-prod. Lewis Diaz helped us get going when we first went live, did training, and helped us talk about how we had it built. From there on out, we've been self-sufficient.

We had all our clients in an on-premise data center in Atlanta, and we started with our first client in the Azure cloud. We built them out, and they went live in April 2020. Little by little, we kept bringing clients from on-premise to the cloud. We were ready to go in less than three months. It probably could have been done sooner, but the migration and coordination with our clients took a lot of time.

One of the support persons from JAMS had come to our organization. He gave us a three-day training and reviewed what we had built. He gave us suggestions on how to do things better. We have one main person who is an administrator. Another person and I are a backup to the administrator. I am a manager. It doesn’t take a lot of people to maintain the product.

The product is giving us a lot of value for the money we're paying.

For what it does, the product is priced very well.

We evaluated AutoSys, but we weren't thrilled with it. However, we included it in the comparison to consider the pros and cons. Security was a key concern.

JAMS servers run our main software, and agents are installed on separate servers where our code runs. The license came with five agents out of the box when we bought the license. It was plenty. We're balancing our load across three servers right now. We had another office in Buffalo with just a handful of jobs we set up. It will run there until we can get those into the cloud, too. We're not even using all five.

It's pretty easy to set up a new agent. Most of the workaround is related to firewalls, getting access, and security. Once it's up, we can run things in that environment. We watch for capacity on the servers that we have the agents on. We're running a ton of stuff currently, but we haven't had any real issues where servers hit high CPU or memory. Performance has been good. We use JAMS only for traditional batch-type operations.

We have alerts for long-running jobs and jobs that could not even start. It's error handling. It has different levels of errors, like informational errors and critical errors. We can mix and match and set up emails to be sent to our team according to the alerts. The tool's alerting capability is pretty good.

The solution has an alerting feature to let us know about exceptions. We've even been able to set up what actions it has to take in different scenarios. It's great.

We're using the product to centralize the management of jobs on all our platforms and applications. We're about ninety percent there. It is important to our organization, especially from an employee standpoint. We need one tool that everybody can be trained on and know about. Having multiple tools across different platforms and having people learn more than one thing is troublesome.

In some of the really difficult situations regarding scheduling and everything, we were able to put something in and get it to work with just a little thought. We did not have to spend too much time on it. It was pretty easy. I like the integration with PowerShell. We use PowerShell a lot. If we're supposed to get ten transactions a day, and we only got five, we run a PowerShell job that checks that count once an hour. If the hourly count is under five, then we fail the job. We use it a lot for monitoring our applications.

We have tons of file transmissions, but we use a different product. JAMS has a really good file watch feature that we utilize all the time. The job runs as soon as the file arrives and does whatever it needs to do with the data. Then, it's available for the business to do what it needs to do.

JAMS helps save time when troubleshooting stalled jobs. The job log is easy to access. We can get that to our programmers if needed. There are many screens showing the job name, but we can't cut and paste it. I'd love to be able to cut and paste the job name from anywhere it shows. It will help us send it to our developers without going elsewhere to find or type it out.

We upgrade every two years to the current version. It's a lot of effort for us to upgrade our products or tools. That's why we're on a two-year rotation unless a major security update would come out. Then, we'd have to upgrade right away.

The product hasn't eliminated the monitoring tools but has augmented them. We only use Azure Monitor. We don't spend a lot of money on monitoring tools. Azure Monitor is included with our Microsoft Azure license. Most of our stuff is set up around that. Our jobs are set up in JAMS. It scans the Azure logs for certain buzzwords. It's all mandated. It's never going to make it go away.

Everything we run in prod, we run in non-prod ten times more because we have ten test environments. We've always had that with whatever product we had. It does help. The developers don't have to manually run a thousand test jobs in a release. However, we always had that configured no matter what product we had.

People looking to buy the solution must get somebody to come out and do the demo. Everybody is very knowledgeable and very professional. They know their product. They're definitely great ambassadors. They put on a good show, and then they stick to it. They back it up with reality.

Overall, I rate the tool a ten out of ten.

We use JAMS to run various tasks, such as nightly claims processing jobs. It's also helpful for moving files around and interfacing between the cloud and our on-prem systems. 

The company has 50 to 100 users, including admins, developers, and on-call maintenance staff. We also have reporting staff who monitor jobs to see if they are succeeding. 

JAMS enables us to formalize simple tasks, reducing the amount of manual work. We can package all the access needed for those tasks, so a non-expert can deal with a problem without disturbing people. It automated 100 percent of the functions that can be automated. It's the only scheduler we have. 

It's hard to quantify how much labor it replaced. It's more than 10 days annually but probably less than 100. It saves staff maybe a day every four weeks. JAMS has centralized management. It is a critical way we deal with multiple systems that interface.  

We have eliminated some tools. For example, we can use JAMS as a monitoring tool and use it in place of Enterprise Manager. Regarding time saved, JAMS saved about 15 to 20 percent compared to our previous scheduler. JAMS also costs less than our last system, significantly reducing operational overhead. 

JAMS handles complex schedules well enough. That's one of the main reasons we use it. We use JAMS to populate our data warehouse every night, ensuring the updated data is available every morning. Troubleshooting failed jobs in JAMS is straightforward. You can navigate the logs quickly, and it sends you an email pointing to the source of the problem. 

JAMS is easier to use and cheaper than our previous solution. The installation is more straightforward, and JAMS has a graphical user interface, so it's more accessible. The interactive processes are helpful. We don't use them often, but it's a nice feature to have.

It sends notifications to the person on-call when a job fails, but the failures rarely have anything to do with JAMS. It allows jobs to restart several times, which often resolves exceptions. I'm satisfied with how it handles exceptions. 

JAMS lacks source control features. Our previous solution had job control language, but JAMS doesn't. When migrating between versions, JAMS doesn't migrate all the data, like job change history, etc. Also, the scheduler doesn't have a way to make jobs invisible, so you can temporarily turn a job off if you decide not to run it today.

We have used JAMS since 2014.

The current version of JAMS is stable. It's more stable than the previous version.

I rate Fortra's customer service a nine out of ten. 

Positive

Deploying JAMS is straightforward. During the initial deployment and migration from the old system, we had to request servers and plan to deploy the client. There were three stages: installation, migrating jobs from our old system, and testing. 

The migration wasn't automatic. We had to reenter most of the jobs from the previous system manually. We took the opportunity to redesign the tasks a little. It wasn't that difficult, and we had no problems replicating the functionality or anything like that. The migration took about six months.

There isn't much maintenance after deployment. We can upgrade to the latest version in two or three hours. 

JAMS is cheaper than our previous solution, and we can run it on any server. The license for our old solution was limited to two servers. JAMS reduced our expenditures by about half compared to the other solution. 

JAMS is much cheaper than our previous solution.

I rate Fortra's JAMS an eight out of ten. 

We use JAMS for file transfer, but instead of using JAMS file transfer, we have a script, a CMD file, which we schedule and configure to use either WinSCP or Ipswitch WS_FTP Professional. It will use either of those to send and receive files. We use it for scheduling file transfers.

It's deployed on AWS.

JAMS saves us on the order of thousands of hours per year.

I can create new jobs and schedule them based on time, based on a file trigger, or based on an email trigger. I'm happy with all those abilities.

The interface is good, and it's very easy to define and create jobs. If a job is not running or there is an error, the solution will send an email. That's all very good and very useful.

One issue which can prevent jobs from running is when a script gets into a loop. Suppose, using WinSCP, that the script connects to a particular vendor but that vendor has changed its server security key. I have to manually accept the new key so that it trusts the new server. Until that happens, the job will be stuck. It retries without end. JAMS will not kill it, even if it is running for, say, four days. We will only realize there's an issue on Sunday when there is a reboot for all the Windows servers, including JAMS. The reboot will kill any hung threads, and then we know something was stuck for days.

I think there is a way to configure JAMS so that if a job is running for so long it will shoot out an email saying, "This job is still running." I pinged support about it a long time ago and they said something like that to me, but I have not been able to configure it yet.

Also, I'm not sure if they have fixed it in a newer version, but there is no global search in the version I have. If I have multiple sub-folders that are named for business units, like HR or IT, and I have to search for a job, I cannot search from the top. I have to go to the HR folder to search for a particular job, or to the IT folder. It would be good to have a global search, where I could search from the top, rather than having to go into sub-folders.

I've been using HelpSystems JAMS for more than a year now. I'm the only admin for PSEG.

I'm exploring JAMS as we go. I'm trying to find more time so that I can explore all the other options it has, such as SAP connectors, so that I can suggest solutions we can use.

We have used their tech support a few times and they were very good each time. They were very responsive and very quick.

Positive

This solution replaced another tool we had before, called Apps15, which crashed one day. We migrated whatever we were doing there, all the CMD scripts, to this. Once we switched, we liked it and it has become one of our very important utilities for all the file transfers between our company and its vendors. We use it for multiple file transfers every day, whenever there is a financial transaction with many files created by SAP and other applications.

It saves us time and it is not an expensive solution for what we are doing. 

Maybe in the future, when we integrate with SAP and other tools, it might be a little costly, but it's still a very cost-effective solution. It's very good.

There is an application called Maestro, but that is built into SAP. In comparison, this is a comparatively very simple and smooth application that takes less time to configure. Maestro and XI are for internal transfers only, while JAMS is the main, approved solution for doing external file transfers. It is our enterprise file transfer tool.

It's a nice tool for scheduling, but make sure you are familiar with all the connectors. It can connect to and integrate with multiple applications. We have the SAP Job Scheduling Service doing its work, but JAMS can also do the SAP portion. Instead of having multiple tools, if you look at all the features that JAMS has, it might be able to replace the other tools so that you just use one.

It's a very good solution. Even my director was very happy with it.