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Stonebranch pros and cons

Vendor: Stonebranch

4.4 out of 5

26 reviews
93% willing to recommend

201 followers

Pros & Cons summary

Stonebranch offers multi-tenancy and Universal Agent to enhance integration and workflow management. Its agents ensure high availability and failover, critical for system operations, yet connectivity issues with Microsoft SRS and challenges in high CPU scenarios limit performance. Networking issues and inadequate high availability in OMS add to operational costs. Regular updates and customer support bolster the technology, but lack of cloud availability and scalability affect its appeal in diverse technology environments.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

Stonebranch offers the ability to name agent aliases, enhancing failover capabilities without changes required in the schedule management.

Agents are simpler and more efficient, notably when compared to other platforms like ESP.

Multi-tenancy allows various users to self-manage their areas, reducing the need for centralized scheduling.

Agent technology is highly compatible with a variety of platforms, from traditional mainframes to modern cloud and container environments.

Stonebranch provides robust monitoring capabilities across both open-system and mainframe environments, offering a unified view of all processes.

CONS

Stonebranch has difficulties with internal scheduling tools due to networking issues.

The OMS component needs to be high-available as a software component to reduce costs.

The agent on the mainframe times out during busy CPU usage, causing tasks to miss results.

Issues occur with connectivity to Microsoft SRS, leading to a loss of visibility.

Stonebranch Universal Automation Center needs improvements in analytics.

Stonebranch Pros review quotes

BL

Sr. System Programmer at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

Apr 17, 2019

I can name the aliases on the agent, so if we need a passive environment for an agent, that's one of the nice features. If our primary goes down, I can bring up the passive one and I don't have to change anything in the scheduling world. It will start running from that new server.

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Sr. Manager - Performance and Automation Engineering at PSCU Financial Services

Aug 22, 2019

The Universal Agent is the most valuable feature. Being agent-based and being able to go across multiple technology stacks, which is what our workflows do, Stonebranch gives us the ability to bridge those disparate technologies. It enables us to remove the dependency-gap with the agent so we know the status of the workflow at each step.

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Senior Technical Analyst at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Apr 17, 2019

We lean a lot on the multi-tenancy that they offer within the product, the ability to get other people to self-manage their estate, versus having a central team do all the scheduling.

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FB

Frank Burkhardt

Application and Database Administrator at Blue Bird Corp

Apr 22, 2020

The tasks are incredibly capable, and as long as you name them with a nice, uniform naming convention, they are very useful. You can create some interesting workflows through various machines, or you can just have it kick off single tasks. All in all, I really like the Universal Task. You can do some mutually exclusive stuff, such as an "A not B" kind of thing. It has a lot of capabilities behind the scenes.

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MB

Systems Programmer II at a insurance company with 501-1,000 employees

May 28, 2019

The ability to monitor tasks that are on the open-system side as well as our mainframe side gives us a one-window view of all our processes.

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Siddharth Matalia

Senior Technical Specialist at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Jan 27, 2023

We like that it has GUI and is not just a command line.

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DP

Doug Perseghetti

Consulting Systems Engineer at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

Jul 4, 2019

The most valuable feature is the reliability of the agents, because we need them accessible and we need to run stuff. The agent technology and compatibility are top-notch.

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Associate Software Engineer at Mphasis

Nov 30, 2023

The features are upgraded, and every six months they're releasing patches.

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Architect & Technical Director at a tech consulting company with 11-50 employees

Jan 4, 2021

The interface is very user-friendly and easy to navigate.

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Senior Manager at Colgate

Sep 15, 2022

The support is good from Stonebranch Universal Automation Center.

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Stonebranch Cons review quotes

BL

Sr. System Programmer at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

Apr 17, 2019

One hiccup we've had is due to the fact that we have other internal scheduling tools. We're able to talk to them, but we have trouble with some of the networking between them, so we're still trying to work out the kinks there.

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Sr. Manager - Performance and Automation Engineering at PSCU Financial Services

Aug 22, 2019

Occasionally, we have an agent that doesn't come back up after patching. That doesn't happen very often... It's really just a restart of the agent and it comes back up. But that might be one thing that could be improved.

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Senior Technical Analyst at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Apr 17, 2019

There is a component called the OMS, which is the message broker. We rely on infrastructure, resiliency, and availability for that piece. If that could change to be highly available just as a software component, so that we don't have to provide the high-available storage, etc. for it, that would be a plus. It would just be cheaper to run.

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Free Report: Stonebranch Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about Stonebranch. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: October 2024.

816,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.

FB

Frank Burkhardt

Application and Database Administrator at Blue Bird Corp

Apr 22, 2020

There is room for improvement with its connectivity with the Microsoft SRS system. It is very weak. They keep telling us it works with it, and technically it does, but it does not provide a lot of visibility. We have lost a lot of visibility migrating to Stonebranch, compared with just running tasks on the SRS server. That's really about the only thing that is a sore point for us.

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MB

Systems Programmer II at a insurance company with 501-1,000 employees

May 28, 2019

I have a request regarding our agent on the mainframe. It may time out when communicating to the Universal Controller, when the mainframe is extremely busy. That can cause a task which is running at that time to not see the results of the job that ran on the mainframe. It happens sporadically during times of really busy CPU usage. We're expecting that enhancement from them in the fourth quarter.

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Siddharth Matalia

Senior Technical Specialist at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Jan 27, 2023

It can be hard to manage the task monitor.

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DP

Doug Perseghetti

Consulting Systems Engineer at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

Jul 4, 2019

The Universal Controller is decent for the money it costs... It needs some work to have full features, compared to other products that are out there, specifically IBM's Workload Scheduler.

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Associate Software Engineer at Mphasis

Nov 30, 2023

It's not available on the cloud, so they should take that due to safety, security, and scalability.

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Architect & Technical Director at a tech consulting company with 11-50 employees

Jan 4, 2021

It would be ideal if they had the exact same features as the CA Workload Automation DE series. It would be helpful to have calendaring options.

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Senior Manager at Colgate

Sep 15, 2022

Stonebranch Universal Automation Center could improve the analytics.

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Show 2 more reviews (out of 12)

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