Tidal by Redwood Reviews

It's a company-wide batch scheduler.

It runs tons for us. It runs Windows, Unix/Linux. We connect with a lot of databases: Oracle, SQL, Sybase. We have BusinessObjects BI adapters, we scan emails, and we incorporate it with TriZetto Facets healthcare solutions. There's so much. It's our core enterprise scheduler.

It helps because we have brought in a lot of other applications and systems where we're able to use an enterprise-level scheduler that is consistently monitored and backed up and has a ton of redundancy so that we don't have any downtime. We're pretty close to 99 percent uptime on our scheduler.

It has reduced some of our weekend and overtime hours. For us, it's all based on the programming around the scheduler. For some teams, it has greatly reduced weekend and night hours, but for some people it hasn't because they babysit the process.

Tidal has also helped us increase capacity in terms of the number of jobs. Over the last three years we've added between 10,000 and 15,000 jobs.

It's very

• user-friendly
• intuitive
• robust.

Most people, once you give them a quick tutorial on it, can figure out how to use Tidal. For the basic user and developer, it's very intuitive. I don't think it's very hard. I teach users how to use this in a quick, 30-minute conference call, and people are usually very quick to learn it. For a basic user, 30 minutes should be fine.

We use the solution for cross-platform and cross-application workloads. That's one of the core reasons we chose it. It's one of a few things in the industry that can be used for cross-platform integration. It has the schedules to monitor the workflow. We have a 24/7, 365 department that monitors the batch schedule. It's fairly easy and intuitive and we could easily set up the alerting systems around it.

Admins can do more because they have more access but you can set that up the way you would like it. That's all configurable, at least in the GUI. In the back-end, obviously, it's only the admins who have access. But both admins and users can see the schedules.

The drill-down feature makes the GUI interface and the scheduling interface load faster because you don't have as much to load into the screen. I personally use it more, but I do know a lot of users don't. It's all dependent on user experience and how much they choose to use it.

Before STA bought this product, Cisco owned it and, unfortunately, they did not update things as well as they should have. We're just now seeing improvements to the product and bug fixes.

The biggest improvement they need to work on is doing better QA checks before they release new patches and service packs. We do find that you can't trust getting the new product right away, as they have to get some bug fixes out. They do tend to have some bugs in the first iteration.

In addition, something that they already know about is that speed can be a little bit of an issue in the environments and the viewers.

And while everything is nice in the GUI interface — they recently upgraded it — they could take it a step further. I would like it to have more flexibility and the overall look of the product could be better. Before this recent patch that we're doing to 6.53, in the 6.5 series it still looked like a product from the 1990s. They recently did a mini-refresh on graphic user interface, but it still looks a little bit clunky. It doesn't look as smooth as I would expect from a 21st-century product, but it's getting there. But this a secondary item, versus the speed and working on bug fixes.

I, myself, have been using Tidal for six or seven years. Our company pretty much runs all of our core processing through scheduling. Tidal is the default and has been the default for many years. So it's hard for us to come up with numbers for how it's improved our operations because we're not a company that just brought Tidal in, brand-new, and it suddenly revamped our company. We've been using it for close to 20 years and I enjoy the product very much.

Tidal is pretty stable. We haven't had any major issues, at least in the last three years that I've been working here, and especially since we upgraded. We haven't had many major issues, and we do have redundancy, which is great. We have redundancy for the primary master backup master, and fault tolerance. That that helps with keeping things stable. As of mid-year 2020, I am decreasing the product stability from 8 to 6 stars due to the amount of bugs we are constantly facing.

It's very scalable. As the company grows you increase the resources. I've worked at a small company that has Tidal and I'm now working at a pretty big company that uses Tidal and it all works pretty seamlessly.

It's pretty extensively used in our company. We have 25,000 jobs in production, and we keep growing. We keep adding jobs.

We have about eight engineers who create jobs and we have about 10 people who are operators who monitor the production schedule. And we have 200 to 300 other users who are developers. They create code that integrates with Tidal and they work with the engineers to create the jobs in Tidal. They access Tidal to view and check their jobs.

We have an architect and two admins to keep the environments up and running. We have the eight engineers who create, monitor, and edit the jobs and the general environment. They are on-call as well. That's the core team for Tidal. And the NOC manages alerts if something happens, to reach out to the on-call people

Technical support is great. They're fantastic. They're very responsive and detailed when we ask them questions. A big thing that I like since STA bought it is that their support has been very responsive and very quick.

Each upgrade has gotten a little bit better. I remember back in the day, when I first started working Tidal, upgrades were a pain, but they're slowly making improvements on the upgrades. One thing I would like to see them improve a little bit on is the documentation, because some parts of the upgrade are not exactly clear and I've had to go through support to help me on what to fill out in certain parts. But their support is actually fairly quick and they have been able to help me with it.

We've done major upgrades, and that's always a multi-month process because you have to do the change-process testing. That depends on the corporation. But the recent upgrade that we're doing from 6.35 to 6.53 has been going really well and has been pretty fast in terms of the actual setup and installation. Other than a little snag that I had to work through with support, it has gone very well. To upgrade each environment has taken an average of an hour-and-a-half to two hours.

There is some very complex strategy for updates. The main thing is to start with the lower environments and back up everything, the database and the servers, and go through each environment in a slow and steady process. We come up with a testing plan before moving on to the next environment. We have to make sure we test each environment thoroughly, over time, before moving to production.

When we did a major upgrade about two years ago, we used BLUEHOUSE to help us, when we went from 5.31 to 6.3 That was a major change. But ever since then, we have been handling each integration or upgrade in-house.

We purchase a seven-year contract. Once that's up, we'll look at renewals and costs and compare them again.

The main thing is to look at whether you really need an enterprise scheduler in general. After that, implementation is very important. Setting up standards from the beginning for the scheduling and the jobs is very key. My biggest advice is to analyze all these processes and come up with a good plan for how to incorporate everything into your scheduling. That would be one of the most important things for Tidal or for any scheduler in general. From the admin side, for the technology itself and the technical stuff, work with and trust Tidal support at the beginning to get to a certain level of how to scope everything out, and then go from there.

I'd rate it an eight out of 10. The main thing is whether or not they come out with a better rollout of their upgrades and patches so that they are less buggy. Unfortunately, they still do come out with a consistent number of bugs. They also need better documentation at the admin level. Those are the two core areas that they're truly lacking in, and a little bit on speed. However, the newer version that we're still testing is supposed to take care of that. We'll have to see when that comes into play.

We use it in our production environment. We use it to schedule and execute many jobs. It is used by multiple application teams within our organization, such as SQL, Unix, ETL platform, MFT, and our AWS team. Other application teams include front office, back office, and accounting. They all use the Tidal environment.

We use Tidal to connect to other resources and systems through many of its adapters, such as for S3, ServiceNow, and PeopleSoft. We use it to trigger jobs in those applications. The REST API is very easy. Our application users use it to create, rerun, or cancel their jobs. And if they want to update something in the database, they do it with the REST API. It's a good feature.

That direct integration to our applications means we don't need to do other integrations from other applications or create scripts for these integrations. The multiple adapters available for connecting to other software make it easy for users to use the solution.

With other tools, you do not have the ability to schedule jobs on their own. You need to create a group and then assign everything to that group. Only then will the job be able to execute. In Tidal, you can schedule a single job and there is no need to create a group. That's what I like the most.

There are other helpful features as well, like SLA monitoring and the data book so you don't need to maintain other documents.

We also use the Graphical Views feature because our end-users want to see how their jobs are being executed and to monitor flows. They want to see how a job flow is going or where it stopped.

The drill-down into details using the Graphical Views feature is a bit difficult and not that helpful. If you want to go into the details, you have to go to the Job Activity. Graphical Views is not that easy for getting that kind of information.

Also, the user interface could be much better. It's an old-looking UI. Tidal could be much more user-friendly and attractive. I think they are working on that.

Another change I would like to see is that when we face issues or bugs in Tidal, we don't get to the root cause. We are told by Tidal, "Just apply this fix pack and it will resolve the issue." But we need to know the root cause. What has caused that issue? That scenario can be improved and Tidal has to work on it. They should provide us with some root cause analysis about every issue because we have to provide the root cause to our organization. Without the root cause, it is difficult for us to identify the problem.

I started working with Tidal, as an administrator, in April, so I have been using it for six to seven months.

In our non-product environment, it is not as stable for us as it is in our production environment. I'm not sure why it is like that.

It is scalable. It has many features that other tools do not provide. It is very convenient to use and we can scale it up.

Tidal has been widely promoted in our company and we are getting multiple requests to onboard teams into Tidal. They are exploring it and giving us feedback. We pass the feedback to Tidal and then they provide us with enhancements. Our job counts are increasing, day by day.

We have 500 to 600 people using Tidal in our environment.

Technical support is good except for the root-cause issue I mentioned. But they are always willing to help. When we ask them to join a bridge, they usually join it and they try to support us. They have good product knowledge and help us troubleshoot things on the calls.

Neutral

We have two deployment models, making it a hybrid, because we have Tidal on-prem and Tidal for cloud as well. They are two different tools, but they are linked to each other. The cloud environment is based in different regions including US East and US West. We have Tidal in both.

The deployment was straightforward. It was not that difficult because we installed it in a Windows environment. It took three to four months because there was a process we needed to follow. We had a team of eight people involved.

There is some maintenance needed. Sometimes, we face issues with the Client Managers, which is the UI console for Tidal. We need to clear the cache monthly so that we do not face issues.

Our organization has been using Tidal for the past 10 to 15 years. That means it's a valuable tool.

It's cost-effective because it is available at a low cost. That saves us a lot of money compared to other tools.

I have worked with IBM Tivoli Workload Scheduler previously and Tidal has many more features. Tidal is a low-cost tool and not expensive in comparison to other tools.

The ease of use of Tidal for automating is moderate, if you have the proper knowledge and training on how to schedule a job. A new person will need some training on how to get a job scheduled in Tidal.

They have multiple new features coming up in the future. They are going to come up with repositories, for example. If you are going to use Tidal, I would recommend going through their documentation in-depth and only then start using it, so that you are aware of everything. When I joined, I was not experienced with Tidal, so I had to go through the documentation, and then I started working with our live production.

We are mainly using it for triggering data jobs. It does a lot of ITIL stuff and data movement from systems into Hadoop. We use it because it has the capability of dependency triggering or dependency running. That's the main idea behind it. Also, it helps us to centralize and organize jobs across the organization.

We use Tidal to run Hadoop backup system, SAP HANA, and SAP BusinessObjects. We also trigger a lot of jobs into SnapLogic, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Workday, and Tableau, along with a couple of dashboards. We run a couple of batches from our Unix and Windows machines: the stuff that the developers are working on and want to run in ITIL. But, SAP is the main thing.

The main goal is to use Tidal for managing and monitoring cross-platform, cross-application workloads. The ability to manage those loads is what they do well. I can put a job to run in SAP, and once the job ends successfully, I can run that job in Hadoop. Or, I can run that job in Salesforce.

Tidal enables admins and users to see the information relevant to them. We have something like 50 different teams working on our Tidal platform. We segregate between them using work groups. When a user logs into Tidal, they only see what they have permission for, not other projects. Data engineers are the users of this solution.

A user who comes into Tidal, develops his job, and creates their job in Tidal, then triggers the job or sets up a schedule. An admin is someone who keeps the lights on, making sure the platform is up and running. They maintain the solution and configure it, doing upgrades.

If I just want to monitor my job, that is something that the solution does really well because there is some constant job activity that you can login and see what has happened every day and every minute. That is pretty good. An admin can drill down to processes and data, but I don't think they are doing that.

The solution has helped to eliminate weekend hours. In the past, we had to schedule a job every Saturday. Then, someone had to login and run the job. Now, Tidal has the capability of event-driven jobs. For example, if a job is failing, we can do something. Or, if a job is completed abnormally, we can rerun the job. So, all of these features that they offer help us not to come into the office on a Saturday. We don't need to have a human person do those weekend activities and treat them. They also thought a lot of about outages in the product. You can set up an outage to an adapter or connection, to say, "Between these hours on the weekend, I don't want to trigger any jobs." That works very well.

The job dependency is something that you cannot have in a regular, simple cron job or simple scheduler dependency. The event-driven jobs are core for us, as we really need that. Therefore, we really need Tidal with its ability to run thousands of jobs per day.

We started to deploy Azure, and it's still not fully baked. We are struggling with it. It is not something that has worked out-of-the-box. We haven't installed Tidal in the public or private cloud. We have a problem with security. While we can install the entire platform in the cloud to handle separate work or an entity, if we want to centralize it, then it's a little difficult.

They don't have good reporting capabilities. From the user perspective, I have 6,000 jobs running per day, and I would like to track them to know exactly what is going on. E.g. if a manager asks me, "Can you bring me this data or can you do a dashboard or report?" I need to take a lot of actions in order to do that. It's not easy to compute that data.

We are now testing version 6.5. The speed of this console is much better than 6.2, where the speed has not been sufficient for me. 

Most of my users are doing customer service review these days. So, we are asking the customers what they think about Tidal and what the vendor needs to improve. The number one that we are exploring is the user experience (UX). It has a lot of features, which is one thing that is great. On the other hand, the user experience is a bit old. It is hard to find what you're looking for. The UX is not intuitive for all users. So, if I'm a user, it might take me some time to know where I need to find my stuff.

It takes a lot of time to learn the product. I have admins and developers who are working on the products for the last three to four years and still don't know all the functionalities. Tidal has really great things about it, but people are focused on their day-to-day job and the solution is not intuitive.

We have internal training where we do two weeks of training for three hours each day. So it's approximately 30 hours of training. I cannot say after that users know everything. It takes about six months to ramp up on Tidal to be really good and professional.

I have been using it for the last three years.

In version 6.5, it is very stable and works quickly. The UI works quickly too. Their services load pretty fast. If one of the servers reboot, they have a layout of the high availability. This means that from each component of the product you have two items. If one of them goes down, then the other one kicks in and starts to work. I really like that idea.

In terms of room for improvement, if one of the master goes down, then another one takes a minute to start. While it is not a big deal, when you commit on four nines, one minute is huge. So, I'm pushing the vendor all the time to be better on this.

They still haven't implemented the load balancing-oriented thinking. So, if I have two client managers, I cannot put them behind a load balancer. Or, I can put them there, but the load balancer will never have a health check. That is something that everyone is doing, building health checks, and they don't have health checks on clients for load balancing. Maybe this will come in the future. I submitted a request for having a health check for load balancers.

In version 6.2, they had a lot of problems. One of the problems is the Oracle support. We are using Oracle RAC and high availability on Oracle. If one of the databases would suddenly goes down, the entire system would crash. In version 6.5, we have tested this. They have done significant work and it's working perfectly. It's not crashing and working continuously without any issues. From this perspective, I am very happy with the new version.

If you have enough memory, it is scalable. We are running 20,000 jobs. We just increased our memory. It scales really well. 

The North American technical support is very good. They go the extra mile for you all the time, and we are very happy them. We have had some problem in the past with the Asian support during IST time, while it is night in the North America. However, I think it's getting better. Overall, I'm very happy.

We used local solutions, like scheduling for each platform, such as SAP Scheduler, SnapLogic scheduler, and cron jobs. We didn't have a centralized place.

I was the architect of the initial setup. The initial setup was complex; it's not easy. They have a lot of settings and configuration that need to be done. There are a lot of small things that vary from environment to environment, and they fail to consider every situation. 

The deployment takes a couple of days.

With our first environment, we tested it in a sandbox. I let my admin play with it to see how it behaved and what are the downsides. Then, we created a document. While I know that they have a document for installation, every time that we go to install, we are finding new issues.

I'm behind a firewall and we are in a limited environment. Our infrastructure is built differently from what they probably tested on their environment. So, it's a bit different from what I need to install. I first put it on the sandbox to see all the issues that we are facing, document step-by-step what we did, and then I go and do it in stage. Now, stage is the place where the developer come in and develop their jobs. Once they are ready, we move the jobs into production. 

Stage is really almost production. If stage wasn't available, then the developer could not work nor deliver. We see if it works for at least three weeks. If we don't have issues during that time, then we deploy to production. 

They do a better job in version 6.5, which we are testing now.

We have seen return on investment.

BMC is really expensive. The other solutions are about the same price. I think Tidal is even cheaper than the others, such as CA, Stonebranch, and JAMS.

Our licensing model for Tidal is on an annual basis. It is very good and works well for us. Tidal's licensing is very transparent and simple. It lets you know, for the amount you use, that's the price that you pay. So, we buy X number of licenses, and we know that this is where we are. I'm very happy with that. I saw the licensing modules on other platforms, and I didn't like them. Other companies and solutions would calculate the connections, adapters, and instances. I think that's the reason that BMC was pretty expensive: They just didn't understand what our needs are.

The solution has no hidden costs. It helps me to plan forward into the future. I know that I can add another 100 or a thousand jobs, and that's how much it will cost me today.

We did evaluate other schedulers. This was the best solution.

I was not the one who selected it in the first place. I was the one who asked to evaluate a replacement at some point. There was a time when Cisco was the owner and we felt like Cisco was not delivering the product like we wanted. We sought to move to a new solution and assessed different solutions: BMC, CA, Stonebranch, and JAMS. We installed all of them, running all our tests. It took us six months to do our evaluation. Eventually, we found out that they are very similar from the infrastructure side. I could not see any advantage using the other solutions.

We discovered that we are good with Tidal and what we have. Then, a new company acquired Tidal from Cisco and they promised a lot of things to be better. We felt that the solution was going to a better place. So, we decided to wait and see how much they invest on the stability. We have been happy with the results. They are really focused on the customer and our pain. They are trying to remediate everything that we have issues with. Therefore, we decided to stay with them for now.

Don't be afraid. Just do it. You will enjoy the features of it. It is a great tool.

You need to test Tidal many times. It's not straightforward. You need to test and learn it. 

We have something that is not unique to many platforms. I have five guys who handle the platform. That's costly for us. We would like to see the platform more automated or straightforward. I would like to not need to hire so many people just to administrate and maintain the platform. 

Our capacity has increased in terms of the number of jobs and integrations, but that is a natural thing. I don't think it's related to the solution. When you start to develop jobs, then year by year the number of jobs grow because the organization is growing. 

I'm very happy with the product, but it's not a fully baked product. It requires babysitting. I have worked on other solutions and know what is there. This takes time for us to install, upgrade, and task because there are so many components to the product. If you do one little mistake, then you can screw the system.

I would rate the solution as an eight (out of 10).

Tidal Automation by Redwood is a user-friendly solution.

I have been using Tidal Automation by Redwood for one and a half months.

I rate Tidal Automation by Redwood a nine out of ten for stability.

Around eight users are using the solution in our organization.

I rate Tidal Automation by Redwood a nine out of ten for scalability.

The solution’s initial setup is easy.

The solution’s deployment took ten days.

I would recommend Tidal Automation by Redwood as the first priority for users looking for any automation tool.

Overall, I rate Tidal Automation by Redwood a nine out of ten.

We primarily use Tidal Automation to schedule batch jobs. 

We are a solution provider and the automation that we implement is for our clients.

Using this solution has improved the way our organization functions because support is available whenever we have problems.

The most valuable feature is the job scheduler, where you can schedule thousands of jobs to execute at specific times. It will schedule dependencies as well.

There are several improvement points that our team has provided to the vendor. 

Our client has been running Tidal Automation for more than three years. We started taking care of it for them between two and three years ago.

This is a stable tool and we use it extensively.

We have thousands of jobs that are scheduled in a batch and run using this tool. It is scalable, and there are a few hundred users.

Our usage may increase to some extent but maybe not because there are competing forces.

Our team is in touch with the product team and whenever there is any problem, we reach out to support and they take care of the issues.

As we are working for a client, we have an arrangement such that we can raise tickets with the vendor. Once we do so, the problems are addressed.

Overall, the support is good.

We did not use another similar solution prior to Tidal.

The initial setup was completed by our client's team.

We do not maintain the system, aside from the case where an upgrade is needed.

It does generate ROI but I do not have specific metrics available because it is known by my customer. When a customer continues to use the same product for a number of years then it seems that they are happy with the return on investment.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.