ActiveBatch by Redwood Reviews

Initially, we were facing a lot of difficulties in monitoring the scheduled jobs. We had to create multiple tasks for managing servers and get it done by using change requests. It was very hectic and time-consuming as we had to monitor each and every server manually. 

After implementing ActiveBatch workload automation we were able to automate all our tasks and build reliable workflows. It provides an option of triggers to eliminate errors and automate triggers based on events/actions. Monitoring, scheduling, and controlling workflows of the jobs and tasks have been simplified in half the time.

We have to monitor our backup servers on a daily basis, creating dump files and verifying all the active master servers that have gotten at least one dump parsing data entry. It's helped with checking servers with error status and analyze/fix/report and monitoring for the latest dump files in the server. These were the most time-consuming tasks and required more attention. Active Batch has helped us to automate these tasks by reducing resource usage and giving us more time for extra productive hours other than monitoring. We are able to track down the server failures easily and fix the issue within the SLA targets thereby achieving effective and improved business processes.

ActiveBatch is highly reliable and scalable for all our automation work. The tool provides excellent service management and intelligent automation for scheduling complex jobs. 

It processes heavy workloads on servers hassle-free - proving the tool's stability. 

ActiveBatch provides summary reports and logs for further analysis and improvements in monitoring servers, which is very handy. With the help of ActiveBatch, we were able to reduce a lot of scripting work for automation tasks as the tool supports max scripting.

Overall, ActiveBatch is highly recommended if you are really struggling with daily monitoring tasks.

I don't see any drawbacks with the usability, however, the documentation part can be improved with some additional guidance about the features and their usage. I have faced struggles to understand, set up the tool, and implement it in my early days as a new user. 

The UI also could be a little more advanced in the next release along with some video tutorials - such as providing a user guide. 

I am using ActiveBatch for two years.

Customer support is good. We were able to get in touch with them when we had queries.

Positive

We did not use any software before; it was completely manual.

As a beginner, the setup was pretty hard due to a lack of deep guidance or documentation.

After automating, we are able to achieve our SLA targets thereby reducing the SLA breach and increasing the KPI by 98% - which is a great ROI.

Setting up the environment was quite hard initially. The pricing seemed to be pretty decent in the market for all our requirements. The licensing is easy as it can be chosen according to the plan that makes the most sense.

We evaluated other software, however, ActiveBatch seemed to be a perfect fit for our requirements.

Active Batch is my go-to option for all my automation-related work.

We have a security project where we need to perform daily scans on a number of our servers and network infrastructure components and keep a check on their health and status. We have implemented the ActiveBatch to perform endpoint security scans on our environment for each and every component and provide us with a detailed report stating their health as well as updating on that server and components that need upgrades. We have scheduled the scans to take place every 12 hours on a daily basis and provide the major stakeholder with detailed reports. 

ActiveBatch has really improved our project by automating the endpoint security scans on our servers and also other components of our environment. 

Being a security project we should have a complete picture of the health of each and every component as well as the servers that need to be upgraded to avoid any malware attacks on non-upgraded servers due to existing vulnerabilities. This has saved associates a number of critical business hours that can be used to concentrate on critical business tasks rather than spending them performing repetitive security scans.

The automation feature is a very valuable feature as the associates do not have to worry about performing repetitive tasks (i.e. endpoint security scans on a daily basis) that would take several hours to complete on a daily basis.

It is also faster and more efficient in conducting endpoint security scans compared to associates who perform it manually, reducing the scope of error and also providing a detailed report on each and every component present in our environment. The reports are very detailed and visually appealing that is shared with major stakeholders.

This product is the gold standard of all the automation tools around. You can schedule jobs easily. It is faster and also more efficient. The product also provides a detailed dashboard after the endpoint security scans are performed. 

The only service that needs improvement is integration support. There are very few documents that provide us with detailed information on the troubleshooting of errors that occur during integration with the existing environment. The team could create more documents and also publish blogs to support customers with queries. 

I've used the solution for less than a year.

As sales operations analysts, our main task is to deal with cumbersome data, forecasting, and sharing these cleaned data with our global partners.

We clean these data and store it in consumable Excel files and then upload these to SQL servers which are in turn connected to visualization tools and we often refresh these tools to publish our dashboards in service.

ActiveBatch has streamlined all these steps with automation and no manual intervention which has helped to decrease errors.

ActiveBatch Workload Automation is a super robust application FOR Regular SQL tasks or other file maintenance which in turn can help us to free up the time that we spend on working on repetitive tasks. Approximately ~25 hours of manual effort has been reduced to ~5 hours.

It also offers a centralized platform for managing activities across many environments, applications, etc.

ActiveBatch has made our lives very easy by automating a lot of features which has led to fewer errors and more accuracy.

The product:

1. Is very easy to use, has a good user interface, and not many prerequisites are needed.
   
2. Offers a centralized platform for managing activities across many environments, applications, etc.
3. Offers good automation where manual intervention is significantly reduced - which has led to fewer manual errors.
4. Does frequent job runs and the load on the server has reduced.

There are a few improvements needed:

1. ActiveBatch Workload Automation is a super robust application for regular SQL tasks or other file maintenance - although it needs a few tweaks.
   
2. ActiveBatch's user interface needs an update as some features are hidden and repetitive clicks are needed to access those.
3. ActiveBatch scalability can be increased to help working on larger workloads.
4. ActiveBatch event-based triggers are not reliable at times.
5. ActiveBatch UI could use a little more help, and video tutorials would be greatly appreciated for user guides.

I've used the solution for one year.

The stability is good.

I'd rate the scalability nine out of ten.

Customer support response was a bit slow when we needed a technical escalation.

Positive

The initial setup was a bit tedious due to a lack of proper user guides.

We implemented the solution via our in-house team.

ActiveBatch has saved a significant amount of manual time (from ~25 hours down to ~5 hours), hence bang for the buck.

Setting up the solution was quite hard initially. The pricing is pretty agreeable for all our requirements. The licensing is easy as we had the choice according to our requirements.

I did not evaluate other options as Active Batch was the top choice and we opted for this without any second thoughts.

ActiveBatch is a robust automation software and it is our go-to option.

ActiveBatch is used for scheduling our nightly batch processes. That is our main use at this point. It includes billing, processing, claims, commission statements, and a lot of reporting. It's all tied into that batch process.

We do use the built-in REST call process for nightly printing, coming out of that batch cycle. We distribute the nightly reports out of the batch cycle to different departments using ActiveBatch. It's used for FTP processing every week coming out of the weekly commissions process.

The most important part to us is to keep those nightly batch cycles in an easy to read format, which is where ActiveBatch Plans come into play. We run these cycles in four different environments, from development to production and a couple stops in between. Keeping all of those jobs separate from one another is key for us.

Outside of batch, we do run a process every five minutes throughout the day during business hours to scrape data from our mainframe entry system to our new policy administration system. As people enter claims into the mainframe system, those claims get moved over within five minutes, rather than waiting for the mainframe batch cycle to run that night and those claims not being seen until the next day. That saves us up to 24 hours. The business end-users can get that data within five minutes now.

ActiveBatch has allowed us to move forward quickly with our modernization effort, to get off of the mainframe and to move that data to a distributed environment. It has been huge for us to use ActiveBatch to run these nightly processes: everything from Dev to QA, UAT, and Production. Those are all cycles that we run every night to allow different users to test processes that they're working on in each of those stages, to get them into production and off the mainframe.

With the systems we're using now, it's a lot easier with ActiveBatch. The mainframe is so manual. If there's a problem with some mainframe code, it requires a call to a developer, but our new system works great with ActiveBatch because everything is built into that system. There's no JCL code or mainframe COBOL code, up front. Our batches just work seamlessly between ActiveBatch and our new administration system. We've had no problem with our batch processing from that point of view. Whereas with the mainframe, it's a struggle at times. If we have a problem with a job and it cancels, we may be waiting three hours for a developer to get online, troubleshoot, test, and get a fix in place so we can finish the cycle. We've not had that issue with ActiveBatch.

A lot of the built-in processes are among the most valuable features because when just starting out, although I went through the ActiveBatch Boot Camp — and I've got a couple of other people who went through it as well — it was a little overwhelming, not having used the product.

We found it easier once we were using the product and then doing refreshers on the Boot Camp or doing the deep dives that ActiveBatch provides. Even the Knowledge Base articles allow us to grow and let us know what we can use in our environment.

We're able to use the Plans, rather than seeing individual jobs within all four of our environments. Seeing all of these jobs individually would be overwhelming to try to easily decipher workflows, whereas everything is nested nicely within each Plan for us. It makes it very easy to read the next day, and to look at how each cycle ran. It also helps with troubleshooting if there's an issue with one of them at night.

As far as centralization goes it's nice because we can see all these processes that are tied to this larger process. The commissions, FTP processing, the reporting, the file moves to the business users — all that is right there. It's very easy to read. It's easy to tie it together, visually, and see where each of these steps fits into the bigger picture.

Other important features for us are file triggers, file constraints, and job constraints, because of the sequential nature of the batch process. The file triggers have made our processes more efficient and reduced delays. It might be minimal at this point, but it would still be a manual process that would have had to be done. Our second-shift operator would have to wait each night for that mainframe cycle to finish and then manually trigger certain processes within each of our ActiveBatch cycles.

It's also a very flexible product. We're just over a year in and we're still getting our feet wet and realizing its potential. One thing I am anxious to roll out — and I've tried to push some business end-user meetings, but it's still a little early in the process as everyone has been so busy with the overall modernization effort — is the Self-Service Portal. It will allow the business users to run processes on-demand, rather than putting in a ticket to have IT do it for them. This would also allow other IT users to see any processes they may be testing, in the ActiveBatch environment.

In addition, the Jobs Library has been a tremendous asset. For the most part, that's what we use. There are some outliers, but we pretty much integrate those Jobs Library steps throughout the process, whether it's REST calls, FTP processes, or file copies and moves. We do use some process job steps to call out external batch processing through external scripts, but most of what we're using is what is built-in, at this point. That has helped us to build end-to-end workflows.

When our mainframe process ends each night it sends out an email to certain users that the system is up, so that they can log on and do work on the mainframe at that point. We tried to use that email as a trigger for our ActiveBatch printing processes but it didn't work out too well. I believe it ended up being a bug that they're going to address in a future release.

But at the same time, that was an easy fix. We were able to change that from an email trigger to a file trigger. Now we have the mainframe job, in addition to sending out that email, create four text files that will trigger our four batch cycles through ActiveBatch. That has worked out great for us.

One thing I've noticed is that navigation can be difficult unless you are familiar with the structure that we have in place. If someone else had to look at our ActiveBatch console and find a job, they might not know where to find it. That being said, I have been using that search function a lot lately. That search function is definitely your friend.

I have been using ActiveBatch for about a year-and-a-half.

I've not had any major issues with ActiveBatch at all. It seems extremely stable. We've not had any downtime. We've had issues here and there with different processes, but nothing that has affected the overall environment. Granted, we don't have very many users on it; it's mostly processing at this point.

In terms of bandwidth, we've not had an issue. There are no limitations that I can see.

The email support can be hit-or-miss. Overall, I've had a pretty good experience with it. They're quick to reply and they let you know exactly what they need. You get it to them and they dig into it and get back to you. Sometimes it can be cumbersome emailing back and forth and waiting for replies. Overall, it's been good.

We didn't have a previous solution.

We were looking for a product that could handle a company-wide insurance systems modernization project. This project has been in the making for years. It boiled down to putting new products on our distributed systems, migrating data from the mainframe to those distributed systems, and eventually sun-setting the mainframe. This approach makes more sense since it's simpler to start with new products rather than migration to begin with and this also allowed us a nice starting point with ActiveBatch.

Out-of-the-box, it was a challenge to understand the best way to structure it for our system. Obviously you don't know what you don't know. Once we started using it, we realized the best way to lay it out for ourselves and it became easier and easier over time. I've had to move things around a great deal to make it easier because we weren't sure, when starting, how to set it up, as far as our environment goes with its file structure and object structure.

As far as objects go, it's pretty straightforward. It's like any other file structure. It's just a matter of knowing what you need for your environment, which is something you learn as you go: You need these things in this folder, you need those items in that folder. Do you want all your FTP processes in one folder or do you want them underneath a certain project that they're tied to?

As far as setup and configuration go, they're very straightforward. I've never seen an issue with that or with upgrading.

The planning stage took a while. We got the product and then I and another operator went through the training, which we did in a week. The actual deployment has been scattered. The initial deployment went well, but it was staggered because there were, and still are, different pieces flowing in, a little at a time. It won't be really set until we get all of our business on this platform. It's as set as it can be right now. The actual deployment slowly fell into place. I hate to say it took two months to deploy this product. It didn't. But to get to where we were comfortable running that first batch cycle, it probably did, but that's no fault of ActiveBatch. That's just developers getting the pieces to us and then us figuring out how to use ActiveBatch in the most efficient manner.

We implemented ActiveBatch on our own, but we did work closely with the provider of our new policy administration system and learning how the two products would work together for batch processing. I have worked very closely with someone there to tie in with ActiveBatch. I don't believe he had experience with ActiveBatch prior to that, but one of his coworkers did and he called on that coworker from time to time. We mostly worked on using ActiveBatch to call those external processes through the scripts that were provided to us. That's where we had to get them involved because that was also a new product to us, and it still is. So we were trying to learn how that product worked, how ActiveBatch worked, and how to get them to work together.

For ActiveBatch there were five or six people within Operations/Infrastructure involved in the deployment. We're a small-to-midsize company with a couple of hundred employees.

It's hard to say how many hours it has saved because it is new. There have been a lot of hours put into learning the product. For instance, putting SSIS packages in has required a lot of Knowledge Base research on ActiveBatch's site. The Knowledge Base is tremendous there. I've really never had an issue finding plenty of information, sometimes more than enough information, to decipher. But in terms of man-hours, at this point, it's just figuring out the system and how to set up these jobs to work together. Those savings will definitely really be seen down the road.

But our return on investment is because it has allowed us to move forward with this project. Even with just using new business, it's allowed us to move incredibly fast when it comes to putting these batch processes in place. So far there's limited data and each cycle runs in 10-20 minutes, but at the same time, on the back end, it's providing that foundation. So we'll know what we need to do when we have more data. For example, currently, load-balancing is counterproductive. There's so little processing going on that it would take longer to load balance this 10-minute cycle than it would be to just run straight through.

The cost is outside the scope of my job responsibilities. Obviously we're using it, so it was worth the cost. I think it's a tremendous product. I don't know what the cost is compared to others, but having seen the results, it's worth it.

We recently signed up for the certification courses and training, which is money well spent. Anything involving training is money well spent, but especially with a new product that is going to be a major part of your environment and your business. From what I've seen, the videos and online training through ActiveBatch are tremendous. They provide examples, and they actually provide a test environment with jobs that you can put into ActiveBatch. You're able to run these jobs, make changes to them and work through the training with them.

Maybe at a higher level in our company there was some research into other solutions and came to ActiveBatch as the best solution. As far as I know, it has always been ActiveBatch. I was hearing that name long before we had it in hand.

Jump in. That's what we did and we're seeing the results. I can't stress enough how much it's allowed us to move forward with this modernization project. Overall, it really has been seamless. There have been a lot of hours on my part, learning the system and researching different processes that I need to put in place for the cycles. But to anyone else, the end result probably appears seamless. It is a lot of work learning it, especially if you have no prior knowledge of enterprise job schedulers and that type of flow. But ActiveBatch provides a wealth of information; their Knowledge Base is tremendous. The support gets back to you pretty much immediately. It might take them a couple of days here and there while they're researching or working with their engineers to replicate a problem.

And sign up for the training, for sure, as well as the additional training certification. In the year since I took the Boot Camp and worked my way through putting this in place to meet our immediate needs, when I revisited the Boot Camp, I found there was a ton of stuff that you forget that you can be using. In that initial Boot Camp, you're really not sure exactly what you're going to use it for. Once you start seeing ActiveBatch processes in your system and go through that training again, you realize, "Oh yeah, I can definitely see where I can tie this in," or "Yeah, we can definitely use that here or we could use this function in this way instead of that way." It will definitely help you become more efficient.

It's easy to learn the basics. It's just a matter of knowing what you need to know, what you need to use it for. At that point the ball is in your court because, while it can definitely be challenging, at the same time it's very rewarding to see things fall into place the way you pictured them. It is a very powerful tool and we've only barely scratched the surface. Keep learning. I'm learning more and more processes within ActiveBatch every day. It's definitely an ongoing process.

What I've learned from using ActiveBatch is that the sky's the limit. With all the additional, third-party licenses — Active Directory, System Manager — at this point it seems endless for us. I honestly don't know where we would be without it at this point.

We just started testing SSIS packages, as we're trying to move those off of the SQL environment and into ActiveBatch, rather than setting up schedules within SQL. We started testing one, out-of-the-box, and we're ready to move that to production this week. There will be more after that.

We aren't leveraging the cloud. We are trying to get into that area but, at the same time, we're focused on this part of our modernization project right now, getting off of the mainframe first and onto the distributed systems. Then we can take it another step. We don't have any of those additional licenses for integration with things like SharePoint, Informatica, or ServiceNow. Those options are definitely something my manager has his finger on. He knows those are available and he realizes ActiveBatch can definitely be leveraged to a greater extent.

Our developers work outside of ActiveBatch. It's mostly me who puts together the ActiveBatch jobs. The developers are mainly mainframe developers who don't touch ActiveBatch, or they are application developers who tie everything together into this entire modernization effort. There are a ton of products tied into that effort, ActiveBatch being one. ActiveBatch "brings the others together," such as printing from a third-party vendo, our insurance suite for billing, claims, commissions, etc. A new underwriting tool will also be tied in eventually. So most of the developers are working on those other applications. Direct users of ActiveBatch boil down to me and a couple others who are familiar with Activebatch but who are not as familiar with it as I am.

Currently, any issues with the batch processes are more the result of a learning curve for us.

I would rate the solution at eight out of 10. I'm a stickler with ratings. Nine would be the highest I would ever give anything because nothing is perfect. Here, it comes down to the fact that the navigation can be clunky at times, but I think that's more on you to learn. One thing ActiveBatch could do is provide more examples of real-life business use and business case examples, that show how others have structured their systems. That would probably be a big help. They do tell you how to organize jobs within Plans and you can nest things that way, but more real-life examples would probably have helped me to see how other businesses are using it or how their folder or their object structures are set up.

I love the product. It's exactly what we were looking for.

We used the solution extensively in material planning, material transfer, SCM activities (such as outsourcing, purchasing, OEM reworks, production planning, manufacturing BOMs, work order closures, calculating and identifying SLE of material, scrap stores, customer and supplier tracks, finance, invoice billing, and securely managing data processing and data transfer). 

The main issue we encountered was that we users could not customize the software as needed as different organizations have different working cultures and different aerospace standards to maintain. Therefore, for any new improvements, we had to contact the service engineer and discuss the requirements. Except for this, the other functions were fantastic, with a little software training to understand the purpose of each function.

I'd like to share positive feedback on this, since the negative side is so minor. On the positive side, this tool is very much necessary for all manufacturing and production companies, and I strongly recommend it as the uses and functions of this tool are vast and can be used in almost all departments in the organization, including stores, business development, SCM, purchase, PPC, manufacturing, quality, finance, program management, and so on.

It has definitely improved my working culture by easily getting the job done.

The automation of ActiveBatch workloads is great. 

The user interface is exceptional; it is very secure and data leak-proof, which is very important to any organization. It is very useful in sending confidential files through FPP servers. 

There are no multiple login issues. You can easily identify who is accessing your login, if any. 

It aids in the great planning of our daily activities.

One more important feature is to get the summary report and presentations, which greatly helped in improving production work.

The product should be improved by providing a customization option. It would be very helpful in getting our own options as required.

The software can still be more user-friendly. By providing training, we could explore as many options as possible, and the mistakes could be more easily avoided.

Pricing can be minimized a bit.

Instead of having to upgrade each of the execution agents, there should be a mechanism in place where the agents are automatically updated when a new version is released.

Otherwise, it is very good software.

I've used the solution for over a year.

The stability is good.

I'd rate the scalability eight out of ten.

Customer support is pretty good. We have no concerns.

Positive

As the organization changes, we tend to use the most efficient software which is available. 

The initial setup was pretty straightforward, with no major difficulties encountered.

We handled the setup in-house.

The product is definitely worth the money.

The product is a bit costly.

I've also evaluated SAP HANA, ERP, and Oracle.

As a QA engineer, monitoring logs in the production environment was one tedious task. This was time-consuming and required lots of manual effort. However, using ActiveBatch Workload minimized the downtime and maximized productivity.

Job scheduling is another major advantage of this tool. At the time, there were nightly batch jobs like Trigger Service, User Service, Notifications Service, and many more, which were easily handled by ActiveBatch Workload and made our job simple and effortless. We currently have 25 jobs running on this platform with different environments.

There were more than 20 bots developed for the closure of tickets, and every bot has to be run on different environments. Using ActiveBatch has improved our job scheduling and reduced the manual effort of closing similar kinds of tickets. This way, operation costs are significantly reduced. Anyone can now run the bots and complete the automation work with zero knowledge.

We work with different time zones. This tool helped to schedule the jobs irrespective of a timeframe as this tool supports all time zones, and the jobs are scheduled accordingly.

We used to monitor the dashboard every hour to report in which task the orders failed, and huge task failures were to be immediately reported. 

Using this tool, if there are any huge failures, we immediately get an email notification, and the proper team will be informed, at which time they can act accordingly. It helped us to stop having to monitor the dashboard each and every hour. This helped us to avoid huge impacts on our business.

We also have integrated three different applications and are able to fetch information without any issues.

Setting up the software was hard. This could still be made easier. At times, the email alerts won’t work properly. There should be proper documentation for the email workflow.

The new version looks good, however, it has lots of lag and often crashes - unlike the older versions. 

Exporting the documents in .jpg format was a bit difficult.

Customer Service could be better.

It's been one year since I’ve been using ActiveBatch Workload Automation. It made my job easy by providing automation for job scheduling and monitoring.

As of now, the product looks stable, and it works well in all environments. This is a go-to product for all organizations.

Organizations with more than 1000-1500 employees can scale easily.

Customer service could be better as I have faced some issues at times.

Positive

I have used Selenium previously. However, job scheduling, monitoring dashboard, and email alert features were not there. This is the major reason why I switched to ActiveBatch.

The initial setup was complex as we wanted to set it up on different environments like Windows and Linux.

This was implemented through an in-house deployment, and I would rate the process eight out of ten. The level of expertise was high.

I have not been in touch with the financial team who would monitor ROI. This is unknown to me.

The pricing was high for organizational purposes, and the set-up cost was okay. 

I have used Selenium, and there were many drawbacks, so I switched to this application as it made my work easy and simple. 

I have no concerns about the application, as it has worked very well for me and my team. I recommend the solution to others. They could take advantage of this application by reducing their manual work.

Primarily, we've been using it in a localized way, but it's becoming more and more of an enterprise tool as the knowledge is shared throughout the team and department. But primarily it has been used for ETL-type work. My team is data integration and we use it to schedule our Informatica PowerCenter workflows as well as DataStage. We also use it for a lot of file transfers, such as SFTP stuff. And we've recently explored some API calls that we can use to interface with Qlik.

It's really helpful with scheduling and setting up dependencies. I primarily use it with our data warehouse and there are a lot of dependencies. First you have to load XYZ tables before it's filtered and presented in the reporting layer. It really helps to maintain those constraints and dependencies.

We use it to schedule our data warehouse. We use the Informatica PowerCenter tool and we have Oracle's out-of-the-box Data Warehouse so there are a lot of workflows that need to run, either sequentially or that are dependent on one another. ActiveBatch really handles hundreds of workflows on a schedule and it definitely maintains those constraints. I've never seen a failure to trigger a job at an appropriate time. We definitely rely on it heavily in that regard.

ActiveBatch was originally purchased as a scheduler, to enable us to execute DataStage jobs, but once we started to grow, and our use cases started to vary, we realized that we could use the pre-built SFTP capabilities. Previously, we had to code things in our DataStage tool where it wasn't as intuitive. You really had to get into the programming. But a business user can certainly use ActiveBatch to set up an SFTP connection, as long as they have the information. It's pretty easy to do that. Moving SFTP files around is certainly valuable to the business because I work for a hospital. The health system is definitely reliant on the data that we move around, and ActiveBatch really executes the ETL workflows that actually transform and move the data. We rely on it to appropriately schedule and execute those workflows to get the data to the right place.

The solution has become our center of excellence for all things related to automation in our organization. We started with DataStage and then we acquired the Informatica tool and we use ActiveBatch for that. Now we're seeing we can use the scheduling capabilities of ActiveBatch to call our Qlik refresh applications. We're starting to expand ActiveBatch as an enterprise solution and other departments are also finding that they can do all the remote scripting that they used to have to do manually, or that operations would have to do, in ActiveBatch and it will take care of that on a schedule, instead of wasting man-hours.

It also provides proactive error detection, even in real time. Almost all of our workflows have a lot of notifications set up to either email, or page, or create a ServiceNow ticket if there is a failure. We're notified immediately if something's not working as it should. That has prevented problems from becoming fires. If we didn't get those notifications, if our data warehouse was not operating as we expected it to, that certainly would cause some problems. 

In addition, in terms of workflow completion times, I don't know what we would have done without it, as far as scheduling goes. It would probably be a lot more complicated to schedule a lot of our workflows through these other products that are more focused on the data manipulation and are not as concerned with scheduling. So to be able to schedule and set up dependencies has been pretty valuable for us. It has improved our workflow completion rates by five hours per day, because we execute our workflows daily. It has also reduced our man-hours by something like 60 percent. It has a lot of intuitive stuff so that instead of building out code for it, we can just plug-and-play with it. You put in the right parameters and it takes care of it for you.

We have definitely been able to re-assign staff to more value-added activities as a result of using ActiveBatch. Something that has been very valuable for us is that we have been able to build our solutions in a way that, if they fail, ActiveBatch actually tries to restart them itself, without any manual intervention. If that fails it goes to our operations team. Before, that was something that our ETL or data integration team had to handle ourselves. Being able to push those issues to ActiveBach and to the other team, it has really saved us a lot of time.

We do a lot of very specific scheduling. You could do it as simply as, "Hey, run this every day at six o'clock," or you could do something like an exact date and exclude bank holidays. It has a very robust scheduling aspect.

We use a lot of SFTP stuff. With version 11 and version 12 they came out with a managed file transfer. They have a lot of pre-programmed "job steps" so that you don't have to develop custom code. You can just say, "Copy file. SFTP file." They build up a lot of the common uses that you would be looking to develop yourself.

We leverage the solution's native integrations regularly. We have to get files from a remote server outside the organization, and even send things outside the organization. We use a lot of its file manipulation and SFTP functionality for contacting remote servers. 

ActiveBatch also has a lot of pre-built looping structures, reading files, looping-if-branch; basic programming concepts are pre-built for you and robust. That's definitely nice.

It's very easy to use. I was self-taught before any training was available for our company. It's very easy to learn to use yourself. I have a technical background but even some of our business users, with some light training, would be able to navigate and use the tool very easily. Things like the copy files or move files are very intuitive.

It's extremely flexible. In addition to that pre-built functionality and the ability to create API calls, it allows us to create our own service library. That wasn't default but they said "Hey, we have this package where you can build your own library." It also has some different scripting of job steps. If I want to use PowerShell to achieve something that might not be out-of-the-box, I've been able to leverage that utility to achieve whatever we're looking to do. If there's a problem that needs a solution that may not be available in our ETL products, my first go-to is ActiveBatch to do some scripting.

Between version 10 and version 12 there was a change. In version 10, they had each object in its own folder. But on the back end, they saw it at the root level. So when we moved over to version 12, everything was in the same area mixed together. It was incredibly difficult and we actually had to create our own folders and move those objects—like schedules, jobs, user accounts—and manually put those into folders, whereas the previous version already had it. They did allow us to filter so that we could see things, but that was not nearly as effective as what we had become used to having.

I've been using ActiveBatch Workload Automation for three years.

It's very stable. Any of the issues that we tend to see are related to the product that ActiveBatch is trying to talk to. For example, we use the web service for our Informatica tool, and issues we see are on the PowerCenter side, not the ActiveBatch side.

I know it has features for scaling, so as we continue to build it out as an enterprise tool we're able to use what they call a Virtual Root. The team using it doesn't see everybody else's work, they only see what's relevant to them. That's really neat. 

We went from one team using it to some four or five teams using it now. The other teams are just starting, but I don't see any collisions. It's easy to grow.

We have about 30 users of the solution, including developers, solution architects, operations, trainers, administrators, and data modelers.

Their support is good. For every support question I've raised they've had very responsive teams. To date, we haven't submitted an issue that they haven't been able to correct or provide some sort of solution for.

Before ActiveBatch, as they created jobs, they used our DataStage tool as the scheduler. That functionality was within the product.

I was involved in the deployment of the current version. We originally had version 10, but within the last year we upgraded to version 12 and I played a role in that. From my perspective as a user of the application, it was very seamless, especially moving our existing workflows. We needed to keep them running on the new version and the backward compatibility was spot-on.

That upgrade process took about three months but that was not a dedicated, focused effort. There were a lot of other variables.

I would recommend taking the time to understand the different objects and features so that, as you grow as an enterprise, the architecture is already in place and you're not figuring it out as you go, like we did.

The ability to automate predictable, repeatable processes is something that we haven't leveraged as much. It's the Heuristic Queue Allocation where it can schedule and manage execution of workflows with whatever resource is available. With that said, I do notice that it does track, by default, the average run time and how long jobs run. There are some default analytics that it provides.

Most of the jobs are for the automation of processes, but we also use it for IT operations, including monitoring. We execute over 20,000 jobs daily.

It's moving data files and doing a lot of calculations in hydrology and the like. The business users are maintaining their own jobs, setting them up, configuring, and maintaining them. They only contact us, in IT,  if there are any problems. 

ActiveBatch is completely on-prem but the rest of our organization has many different kinds of infrastructure and locations, both in the cloud and in 16 countries. We have about 4,000 employees.

The automation has saved us many hours although I can't say exactly how many.

We're able to create workflows without coding.

I would imagine it has also resulted in an improvement in workflow completion times as well.

Our IT organization is using it for monitoring. We get information by running checks using ActiveBatch to obtain information to provide to the monitoring systems. It helps us keep systems up and to receive early warning about problems.

We use the main job-scheduling feature. It's the only thing we use in the tool. That's the reason we are using the tool: to reduce costs by replacing manual tasks with automated tasks and to perform regular, repetitive tasks in a more reliable way.

It's quite customizable because it supports many different platforms and technologies, and it covers almost everything we need to set up different jobs in our environment. We are using it mostly for our Windows and Unix servers and we are using different triggers, for example, Apache ActiveMQ. It is used by many different applications and systems. We use various databases, including Oracle, SQL Server, Microsoft, as well as Active Directory.

We are at the beginning of implementing agents in our Azure cloud. We haven't used that part very much yet but it will be used. We are moving more and more systems from on-prem to the cloud, so it will increase gradually.

It could be easier to provide dashboards on how many jobs are running at the same time; more monitoring.

We've been using ActiveBatch for at least 10 years. We're on version 11 but we are planning to upgrade to version 12 in a couple of months. 

I'm not an end-user, I'm just responsible for making sure it's working. I troubleshoot if something is wrong and I do upgrading and installing.

It's pretty reliable. If it's organized and configured in an optimal way it works pretty well, but it requires a lot of planning. For example, you have to make sure that end-users don't have too many privileges because they can mess things up. It's very important to plan carefully before implementing.

We have had some issues in one of our installations in Germany, but they are still on version 10, which is quite an old implementation. They will replace that with the new version 12 in the near future.

The scalability is quite good. You can add more agents. We haven't had any performance problems or issues with it.

The number of jobs and the number of applications that take advantage of ActiveBatch are growing constantly within our company. 

Other than scheduling in Windows, I don't think our company had a previous solution.

ActiveBatch was already implemented when I came to this company, but I have been here for a couple of upgrades.

Some parts of the setup are straightforward and some parts are more complex. The main features are pretty straightforward to set up but when it comes to the features that require an internet information server, it's a bit more tricky to set the secure connections and certificates, etc. We struggled a bit with that but we had good support from the vendor. They were able to make it work.

The implementation itself doesn't take a long time, but it takes a lot of planning: Security, execution agents, and the like. 

There are two of us who work with ActiveBatch maintenance, but it's not a full-time responsibility. We have between 100 and 200 people who transact with it. Some of them have read-only access so that they can view the jobs.

I also have experience with CA Workload Automation. It has been some years since I worked with it but it's the same concept and the same features but doing things in slightly different ways. 

Start with a simple, small version and try some simple tasks to see how effective it is.

Using  ActiveBatch I have learned that the potential for reducing costs using an automation tool is huge, and that when the business becomes aware of it they really embrace the product.