ActiveBatch by Redwood Pros review quotes

RB
Nov 4, 2020
Since we are no longer waiting for an operator to see that a job is finished, we have changed our daily cycle from running in eight hours down to about five. We had a third shift-operator retire and that position was never refilled.
JF
Nov 30, 2020
ActiveBatch's Self-Service Portal allows our business units to run and monitor their own workloads. They can simply run and review the logs, but they can't modify them. It increases their productivity because they are able to take care of things on their own. It saves us time from having to rerun the scripts, because the business units can just go ahead and log in and and rerun it themselves.
SG
Apr 8, 2020
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.
Learn what your peers think about ActiveBatch by Redwood. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
PB
May 5, 2022
The most valuable feature is its stability. We've only had very minor issues and generally they have happened because someone has applied a patch on a Windows operating system and it has caused some grief. We've actually been able to resolve those issues quite quickly with ActiveBatch. In all the time that I've had use of ActiveBatch, it hasn't failed completely once. Uptime is almost 100 percent.
JM
Mar 29, 2020
One of the most valuable features is the job templates. If we need to create an FTP job, we just drag over the FTP template and fill out the requirements using the variables that ActiveBatch uses. And that makes it reusable. We can create a job once but use it for many different clients.
BO
Mar 29, 2020
The nice thing about ActiveBatch is once we have created a specific job that can be easily be replicated to another job, then minimal changes will have to be made. This makes things nice. Reduction of coding is substantial in a lot of cases. The replication of one job to another is just doing a few minor tweaks and rolling it into production. This decreases our development costs substantially.
PM
Mar 31, 2020
What ActiveBatch allows you to do is develop a more efficient process. It gave me visibility into all my jobs so I could choose which jobs to run in parallel. This is much easier than when I have to try to do it through cron for Windows XP, where you really can't do things in parallel and know what is going on.
MS
Mar 31, 2020
One of the valuable features is the ability to trigger workflows, one after another, based on success, without having to worry about overlapping workflows. The ability to integrate our BI, analytics, and our data quality jobs is also valuable
DM
Jan 29, 2021
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.
JB
Feb 7, 2021
ActiveBatch can automate predictable, repeatable processes very well. There is no real trick to what ActiveBatch does. ActiveBatch does exactly what you would expect a scheduling piece of software to do. It does it in a timely manner and does it with very little outside interference and fanfare. It runs when it is supposed to, and I don't have to jump through a bunch of hoops to double check it.
 

ActiveBatch by Redwood Cons review quotes

RB
Nov 4, 2020
There are some issues with this version and finding the jobs that it ran. If you're looking at 1,000 different jobs, it shows based on the execution time, not necessarily the run time. So, if there was a constraint waiting, you may be looking for it in the wrong time frame. Plus, with thousands of jobs showing up and the way it pages output jobs, sometimes you end up with multiple pages on the screen, then you have to go through to find the specific job you're looking for. On the opposite side, you can limit the daily activity screen to show only jobs that failed or jobs currently running, which will shrink that back down. However, we have operators who are looking at the whole nightly cycle to make sure everything is there and make sure nothing got blocked or was waiting. Sometimes, they have a hard time finding every item within the list.
JF
Nov 30, 2020
They have some crucial design flaws within the console that still need to be worked out because it is not working exactly how we hoped to see it, e.g., just some minor things where when you hit the save button, then all of a sudden all your job's library items collapse. Then, in order to continue on with your testing, you have to open those back up. I have taken that to them, and they are like, "Yep. We know about it. We know we have some enhancements that need to be taken care of. We have more developers now." They are working towards taking the minor things that annoy us, resolving them, and getting them fixed.
SG
Apr 8, 2020
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.
Learn what your peers think about ActiveBatch by Redwood. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
PB
May 5, 2022
A nice thing to have would be the ability to comfortably pass variables from one job to another. That was one of the things that I found difficult.
JM
Mar 29, 2020
It does have a little bit of a learning curve because it is fairly complex. You have to learn how it does things. I don't know if it's any worse than any other tool would be, just because of the nature of what it does... the learning curve is the hardest part.
BO
Mar 29, 2020
There is this back and forth, where ActiveBatch says, "Your Oracle people should be dealing with this," and Oracle people say, "No, we don't know anything about ActiveBatch." Then, it all falls back on me as to what happens. Nobody is taking responsibility. This is the biggest failing for ActiveBatch.
PM
Mar 31, 2020
I can't get the cleaning up of logs to work consistently. Right now, we are not setup correctly, and maybe it is something that I have not effectively communicated to them.
MS
Mar 31, 2020
The thing I've noticed the most is the Help function. It's very difficult, at times, to find examples of how to do something. The Help function will explain what the tool does, but we're not a Windows shop at the data warehouse. Our data warehouse jobs actually run on Linux servers. Finding things for Linux-based solutions is not as easy as it is for Windows-based solutions. I would like to see more examples, and more non-Windows examples as well, in the Help.
DM
Jan 29, 2021
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.
JB
Feb 7, 2021
The reporting needs improvement. There is a real need for the ability to generate audit reports on the fly. It needs to be a lot easier than what I can do right now. This is a major item for me.