ActiveBatch by Redwood Reviews

We send out requests to leaders for the inputs, and the inputs are either shared via emails or uploaded on SharePoint. Then, we download that data process them, and convert them to consumable format in Excel, the excel files then get uploaded onto SQL servers which are connected to visualization tools, post refresh we publish the reports onto services.

The entire process of scheduling, running DB jobs, applying security, refreshing DB, publish was done manually and repeated whenever new inputs come in, now ActiveBatch has streamlined the entire flow with a minimal error rate.

My team consists of five associates. We mainly deal with pricing, sales operations, reporting, forecasting, and several other analytics.

The use of ActiveBatch has made all our lives easy by automating a lot of manual repetitive tasks that we do on a daily basis. We save hours and effort aand gain a high accuracy rate.

Approximately ~20 hours of manual effort have been reduced to ~5 hours with the help of ActiveBatch.

It has enabled us to work on multiple platforms at the same with its capability to integrate with other applications and web services.

The most valuable feature is the drag-and-drop functionality, which makes it a very easy-to-use software for anyone who is working on the software for the very first time. There is minimal coding knowledge required.

I like the ability to integrate with other applications, software, and cloud services which empowers anyone using the software to work on various platforms at any given time.

The job scheduling feature increases the efficiency of the software as it requires minimal manual intervention.

ActiveBatch is a powerful and robust workload automation tool that is the best in the market. I do not see major setbacks in the software. However, there are a few things that need to be improved to make it more efficient and provide a better user experience, such as: 

• reducing the lag
• having more security privileges
• pricing that is more affordable.

However, these minor improvement areas would not impact the efficiency or accuracy of the software. ActiveBatch still remains on top of all the workload automation software out in the market.

I've used the solution for one year.

I do not foresee any challenges with the software scalability, bigger organizations can easily deploy however pricing might be the primary concern for smaller organizations.

I do not have a case to bring out as I have not faced an issue and have never needed to reach out to support.

Positive

There was no transition from similar software.

The initial setup is a little complex; providing a well-documented user guide would resolve the issue.

We handled the setup in-house.

In terms of ROI, the solution has saved manual hours (from ~20 hours to ~5 hours in a month) and increased accuracy by ~17%.

The initial setup is a little complex. Subscriptions can be made for a group at a reasonable price.

I did also evaluate Jira.

The software is definitely the best. With minor fixes, it could be great and remain very competitive.

The primary use case of using ActiveBatch Workload Automation Software is that it enables IT teams to define, schedule, and execute a wide range of batch jobs and workflows, including file transfers, database changes, and application integrations (and much more), all from a single central platform. 

The software can automate mission-critical business processes with ease. My work environment has a large number of applications that must be handled simultaneously. In this scenario, the software really helps to monitor all the processes, which reduces manual intervention and human error while increasing productivity.

My organization's IT operations have been made more efficient by Active Batch, which automates time-consuming, repetitive procedures. The active batch may assist in making sure that crucial activities are carried out in the proper sequence and at the appropriate time with the use of features like job dependencies, event triggers, and notifications. 

Additionally, the software offers real-time monitoring and reporting features that let IT teams keep tabs on the progress of their batch operations and workflows. 

Overall, the software helps organizations improve the reliability and performance of their IT systems.

The Active Batch Workload Automation Software has a feature that I truly appreciate: it automatically distributes workloads over various servers and resources, improving performance and ensuring that the necessary resources are used for the right jobs. 

The software also supports a wide variety of platforms and applications, including Windows, Linux, Unix, and many more popular enterprise applications, making it a flexible and versatile solution for automating critical business workflows. I highly recommend the software.

While ActiveBatch is a robust and comprehensive workload automation software, I feel that it will be of great help if it is improved in the following areas:

As more organizations are moving towards a cloud-based infrastructure, ActiveBatch could incorporate more capabilities that support popular cloud platforms, such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. 

Active Batch could also offer deeper integration with DevOps tools to enable more streamlined and automated software development processes. 

Apart from these enhancements, everything about the software is highly appreciated.

I have been using this solution for the past six to 12 months.

ActiveBatch has a fantastic interface allowing us to efficiently create, manage and monitor workflows. It also offers a drag-and-drop visual workflow designer, enabling users to create complex workflows without coding quickly.    

We can integrate this with various platforms and technologies, including Windows, Linux, Unix, and SQL Server, and this makes it a flexible tool that can be used to automate a variety of IT processes. 

ActiveBatch helped us automate and schedule routine tasks such as data backups, file transfers, database updates, and report generation, which frees IT staff to focus on other studies.

The most valuable feature of ActiveBatch Workload Automation software is its pre-built job steps. The software comes with an extensive library of pre-built job steps that can be used to automate processes in various systems and applications. Due to this, users won't need to create their scripts, which can save time and lower the possibility of errors.

ActiveBatch is a little complex. A steep learning curve can be associated with using ActiveBatch, and it may take some time for a few users to become proficient with the tool.    

Apart from that, I can easily say that ActiveBatch is the best in the business. 

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

Overall it is a stable, great solution.

It is a very good, scalable solution.

Technical support is great.

Positive

Previously I was using a different solution.

I switched since that solution was slow and also the cost was more.

The setup is straightforward.

We deployed the solution with the help of an expert.

This solution is better compared to other software.

We mainly evaluated options based on the cost and flexibility of the software.

We are using ActiveBatch to automate as many of our processes as we can, limiting the amount of time operators are running recurring jobs. Included in that is about 99.5 percent of our nightly cycles. We call a mixture of executables: SSIS jobs, SQL queries, and PowerShell scripts. We also call processes in both PeopleSoft and another third-party package software.

As an IT department, we do solutions for the entire business and control everything. Our nightly cycles affect everybody in the company, so we do have some jobs that we run in one department, then create output which goes to another department. Based on email distribution lists, we can let anybody in the company know when things run.

We don't really use ActiveBatch for sharing knowledge. It's more for sharing output. We have some processes that run SSRS reports that distribute links to many people across the organization all at once, so they all get the same data fed to them simultaneously.

The most complex process that we run is our nightly cycle, which is made up of about 230 individual jobs triggered based on other jobs completing or files showing up in the system. It integrates a mixture of executables, a third-party policy system called LifePRO, and PeopleSoft. With all the handshaking back and forth between the systems, it allows an operator to start a job at around eight o'clock at night. Then, at around two in the morning, the last job finish with very minimal interaction from the operator, who is more sitting there watching to see if a job fails or not.

The operator used to run a job for our nightly cycles and go off doing something, then they would come back to see if the job was finished. If it was, they would start the next job. With the operator's intervention, this entire process would run for around eight hours. We have managed to streamline that down, because we're no longer waiting for an operator to look for a job completion, to run in about five hours. This allows us to have one nighttime operator instead of two, so we have cut the number of staff at night in half.

Additionally, daytime jobs are what we are starting to focus on now to allow our daytime operators to basically sit there and watch different jobs run. We'll be retraining both the nighttime and daytime operators to do different jobs. For example, with our nighttime operator, while the job is running in the background, she doesn't have to do anything anymore. She has now been tasked with other systems, like upgrading servers, and doing other things that cannot be done when the majority of our staff are in the building. So, not only have we removed half of our nighttime staff, we have repurposed our one person whose there to do both jobs.

Internally, we ran a number of executables. Our operators used to run these jobs all manually and press buttons within our console. Now, all those processes are automated. The operator doesn't do anything. We have a number of reports that just get generated automatically throughout the course of the night or based on their own dependency. The operators used to have to wait for a specific job to finish before they could do all these pieces. Currently, those just automatically trigger on their own. In addition to that, with our financial system, PeopleSoft, we can call any job within it automatically. This is without our operators even opening up the PeopleSoft console. In our LifePRO policy system, we have about 150 jobs that we can call those automatically as well, including some daytime jobs that run processes every five minutes. Instead of having the operator sit there like Homer Simpson pressing a button, these jobs trigger automatically, ensuring that all the data is kept updated in real-time.

It is a system that calls other jobs. Therefore, it will return error codes from those other systems. If it's a job that is truly an ActiveBatch job and doing biomanipulation, it will return error codes. The logs associated with those error codes are usually pretty in-depth to let you know exactly what happened. This prevented problems from becoming fires. We have an email that goes out every day with a list of all the jobs that failed to ensure that we hit every single one and can take care any issues.

We have one job that runs every 30 minutes, handling batch input into our system. If one of those jobs fails, then it keeps the rest of them from working the rest of the day. Then, if one of those fails, the entire team that supports that is notified immediately, giving them the full amount of time to rectify the issue before the next time that process runs. In the past, when this was done manually, we would have to wait for someone to notice that there was an error and then find the right person to deal with it. Now, within 10 seconds, an email has been sent out saying, "There is an issue. Fix it."

For our nightly cycles, we have some cycles that will run from start to finish without a single error because it is controlling when jobs run. It does a lot of clean up before the system starts. Therefore, it knows where certain files are supposed to be and where they are. So, we don't have to worry about somebody clicking the wrong button; everything runs from start to finish.

We can control the runtime of files, based on timing, by a file showing up. They can be controlled by an email being sent into the system. We get error codes back. Therefore, we have one centralized location where we can see how jobs are running. We have the ability to notify end users when jobs are finished or if there are problems with jobs. It's a very robust system, which allows for a lot of different functionality.

The system is very easy to use. In a short amount of time, we trained a couple people who have been able to create jobs on their own. For the two people whom I have trained so far, I spent about an hour or two with them. They were able to start creating minor jobs themselves by looking at existing jobs. We gave them minor jobs to work on. Then, within a couple hours, they were able to create jobs and processes that work correctly.

A lot of our processes are jobs that we know run one job after another, along with a hierarchical system, e.g., once this one job finishes, it triggers these three. Then, as soon as those three are done, it triggers a fifth job. The scheduling of those in that format is very easy to do. 

You can set up automated controls where as soon as one job finishes, then another one kicks off. You can put in constraints where a job won't start until other situations are met. It's very easy to use.

The console is very easy and flexible to use. Whenever we have come up with something that we wanted to try in ActiveBatch, we have managed to find a solution. When you're calling an application, you can call it through a batch job or script. You can also call the executable directly or through PowerShell. Depending on how it's running and how the security needs to pass through the system, there are many different ways to get the processes to work.

ActiveBatch provides a central automation hub for scheduling and monitoring, bringing everything together under a single pane of glass. There is a daily activity screen within ActiveBatch that shows you every job currently running. You can look in the past and future. I think you can set it all the way up to seven days in the future. So, if you have jobs scheduled to run on a timeframe, then those will show up. It will show everything that is on hold. You can limit it down to show only the stuff that has run in the last hour, if you are trying to deal with a specific problem. You can set the ranges, to say, "Okay, show me between 5:00 and 8:00 PM." It is very easy to use in that regard.

It handles a lot of different business-critical system for us. We have applications that our agents use out on the field which trigger other things that run in the office. Those run every five minutes looking for input to make sure that we can keep things running smoothly. Things that we would have needed to have the operators, or somebody, just running every couple of minutes, we have about a dozen of those run automatically looking for input to keep things running. It also allows our financial system to integrate with all our other systems without anybody having to do the work. Our whole nightly cycle is automated through this. We just did an inventory, and I think we have about 500 unique jobs that we run through ActiveBatch now. These are things that somebody would have had to run manually in the past.

You can keep history of run times, so you can start setting up SLAs on job performance. We have one job setup now where if that job takes more than 15 minutes to run, then it automatically aborts the job, sending an email saying, "This job needs to be looked at, as it's running past its run time."

The have done a pretty good job with the operator interface. There are a number of different screens which can be used to see what is going on. We have chosen the daily activity screen because it gives the most complete view of what's going on: what's finished, what's failed, and what's currently running.

The performance on ActiveBatch has been stellar.

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.

Now, it integrates well with our other solutions. There were some issues initially with getting ActiveBatch to work, but once we found a solution that worked, it was easy to replicate. The initial issues were a mixture of the fact that very few people had done this type of work before, and partly the person we had working on it at the time. We're not sure exactly what the issue was. We actually reached out to ActiveBatch who helped us to get this to work. 

It is a very complex application because the code we are trying to connect to was COBOL based and still dealt with INI files. So, we had to trick the system into thinking it was calling the system the exact same way. Once we did, everything worked fine, including getting the error messages back and being able to display them within ActiveBatch.

It was the connection between systems that became complex. Basically, we had to set about a dozen environment variables within a script in ActiveBatch. So, when we called the outside application, all those variables were set and we could understood what it was trying to do. The complexity was on the actual calling of the third-party application. It was not from the ActiveBatch side.

You have to be careful with automation tools. We had one job where the person who initially programmed it created an infinite loop, so it kept triggering itself. It ran for less than a second, so we couldn't stop it. 

The company has been using ActiveBatch for about five or six years. I have been using it for about three years.

Stability-wise, there is only one function that we have had trouble with. We haven't even reached out to ActiveBatch to try and figure it out because we're trying to figure out what is causing it. There is one DLL within the system that gets the current date, but will just stop working from time to time. The rest of the system is very stable. On occasion, we will have to reboot a server to release some locks on things, but that's once a month where we have to do anything like that.

I maintain all the jobs in production. There is nothing out of the ordinary that needs to be done. It does its own self-cleanup. It also deletes history periodically on its own.

We started with just a few jobs and are right now up to 500 jobs that we run. When adding new things, it allows you to put everything in its own folders, so you can keep track of different parts. You can flag them as part of different systems, if you want. As we have added more things, we have seen no degradation in the performance.

We use it more as an automation tool, so it is just running jobs. In terms of people who go into ActiveBatch to look at it, we have our two daily operators who go in and look how things are running. We do have some jobs that they go in and trigger, because we're still automating the actual execution of these jobs, but they're all still controlled from ActiveBatch. We have a number of programmers, probably about a dozen, who will go into ActiveBatch. Some will tinker around with creating jobs that they need in our test system. Some will go into production to see how their jobs ran, if they're supporting the system. They can go in and see what the end result was, if it came back successful, had a warning, or an error. They can look at the logs to see what the problem was, allowing them to fix the process themselves.

Right now, we don't have any end users going into the system directly. We're building them a web interface front-end where they will be able to trigger specific jobs, so they can see the jobs that they can control. We have it setup through the ActiveBatch API so it returns the results to that web interface of how the job ran the previous time and when it ran last.

Our nightly cycle is 99.5 percent automated right now. We're finishing up the last few pieces of that. We have started looking at all of our daytime operator jobs. Those are being worked on next. All of our reports sent out to users on a daily basis are all automated within ActiveBatch to be triggered at specific times and sent out. The next piece that we will be working on is giving our programmers the ability to bring up Azure sites as needed, then we will be starting to add in all of our FTP jobs into ActiveBatch as well.

In the past, we haven't used their technical support that much. The few times that I have called and asked them questions, they have been very easy to work with and get the answers from. They are in the process of changing their whole structure on how they support their clients, along with having their pricing structures change. 

They are trying to make the system more user-friendly from the support side, so you can go and look for the information yourself as opposed to trying to call someone.

Previously, we have only used some scheduling through Microsoft Schedulers and SSRS schedulers.

I was not involved for the initial setup. Though, the installation of ActiveBatch was straightforward. 

I was involved the last time that we did an upgrade. Everything was straightforward. Moving the jobs from one version to the next was relatively straightforward. The initial application that they picked to interface with was one of our more complex ones. That may have been why the person who was doing the program initially had an issue, because nobody had done this before with this type of system. 

There are a lot of APIs for packages that you can get with ActiveBatch for doing connections. We don't use a lot of their integration tools, though it does integrate with a lot of different ones. The one we do use right now is PeopleSoft. The issues with the integration of PeopleSoft have been more on the PeopleSoft side, not the ActiveBatch side. We had to reconfigure how we had PeopleSoft setup, so it would allow outside applications to communicate into it.

Once we decided to do the installation, I think it was done in the course of a day over a weekend.

We did the installation ourselves. It was done by our systems department. One of my coworkers did all the work. She installed the new system and exported everything out of the old version into the new one. On top of that, we broke one system into two, because we used to have our model and production on one server. In the course of upgrading to version 12, we put our test and production systems on different servers.

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.

The person who used to run all these jobs now just watches the system run. She is doing other stuff while she is working. On top of that, with the pandemic, we have managed to be able to allow our second shift operator to run everything remotely from home. They don't even have to be in the building anymore to run our cycles.

The central automation hub for scheduling and monitoring brings everything together under a single pane of glass by streamlining everything:

1. It takes less time to run everything.
2. It's less expensive because we no longer have the extra operator running jobs.
3. There is less chance of an operator clicking the wrong button because we run both a test system and production system side by side. In the past, where they might have run the job in the wrong system, this makes sure that the correct system is running the right jobs.
4. It automatically will send an output where it needs to go in real-time. We have management reports that used to have to be run by an operator. Now, if management comes in early, the report is there just waiting for them.

Make sure that the pricing is in the contract.

ActiveBatch is currently redesigning themselves. In the past, they were a low cost solution for automation. They had a nice tool that was very inexpensive. With their five-year plan, they will be more enhancement-driven, so they're trying to improve their software, customer service, and the way that their customers get information from them. In doing that, they're raising the price of their base system. They changed from one pricing model to another, which has caused some friction between ActiveBatch and us. We're working through that right now with them. That's one of the reasons why we're why we were evaluating other software packages. For the time being, we are staying with ActiveBatch because we like it the best of the four.

Up until now, if you wanted to do a training class through them or go into some of their deep dives, you needed to pay additionally for that. The new way that they are doing their structured agreements has that all part of the contract. Now that we will be paying for it, we will be looking at their deep dives a lot more and seeing the stuff that they have done in the past.

It is the only automation tool that we're using. We are actually moving items from other automation tools that we have into this, so we have one central location where everything is automated. In the past, we have used some of our Microsoft Servers' scheduling tools and SQL Servers to automate the distribution of reports. Now, we are moving everything into one place so it's all controlled centrally. Then, you can look in one place to see where everything is. 

We have looked at a few different solutions in this past six months to see if they offer that same type of functionality and evaluated three other ones, which are very similar. I like ActiveBatch the best among the four solutions. The other tools seemed to not have the file manipulation tasks, and kept saying, "Well, you can do that in Doc." I thought, "That's okay. Welcome to the eighties." They basically said, "We don't have any filing manipulation tools built in because you can do that other ways." However, we're trying to put everything in one place. There is a lot of archiving of files that we do based on different criteria. For example, there was one job that we wrote which looks at the size of an Access database. When the size of the file gets too large, it notifies that team, saying, "You need to go delete data out of it." Those kinds of things were not available within other solutions.

I would recommend reaching out to a client who has used it, especially if you have questions. While talking with customer support is great, people who use it on the build have better knowledge of how to use it in the business area.

We haven't used any of the APIs directly through ActiveBatch yet. We have started playing around with having our own little outside website which allows our end users to trigger jobs directly within ActiveBatch. But, we have not fully implemented that yet.

We have started looking at cloud solutions for bringing Azure sites up and down. We have not implemented that yet.

I would rate this solution as a nine out of 10.

We have around 20 scheduled jobs we run every few hours. These include our price fetching jobs, market tracking jobs, subscription checking jobs, profit calculation jobs, etc. These are pretty long scripts with complex instructions to handle multiple data from a different database, microservice APIs, and many public market exchange APIs. All this data crunching was difficult to perform and maintain before ActiveBatch, however, once we started using ActiveBatch workload automation software, scheduling these jobs and tracking data crunching became easy. 

ActiveBatch has improved our organization by making job scheduling and API integrations very easy to use and to get started with. Earlier, we needed to assign these tasks to a high-paying highly-skilled resource. Now, we can train anyone to do the same job with very little effort. Our operation costs are significantly reduced because of ActiveBatch. Now, anyone can complete automation tasks without much knowledge of how computer API works and with no knowledge of coding. This has made our automation easier.

Some of the features we found useful for our use case are:

• Job scheduling. It has helped with scheduling complex jobs with simple scripts.
• API integration. It is very easy to set up regular Rest API calls and data gathering.
• Time Savings. Tracking multiple servers for downtime and multiple jobs logs is very time-consuming. We have to switch between multiple tabs and applications for all this. However, ActiveBatch made it very easy to track the downtime of our own services and logs of our cron jobs very easily. 

Overall, we found these valuable

Some improvements can be made to the user interface. I personally love to see ActiveBatch keep up with current trends in UI development. 

Also, some improvements can definitely can be made to make ActiveBatch more beginner friendly.

The custom theme could be a new feature suggestion for ActiveBatch.

Apart from these, I don't have any suggestions for ActiveBatch. They did a pretty good job of giving the best state-of-the-art features. All of these features are very well thought out and very useful

I've used the solution for two years.

The stability is great.

The scalability is great. We are onboarding new users, and our number of jobs is growing. We have not faced any problems.

Technical support offers great support with a fast response time.

Positive

ActiveBatch is the first software of this nature that I have used. 

The initial setup is straightforward.

We handled the implementation with an in-house team.

ActiveBatch gave us a good ROI in our organization.

The features provided in ActiveBatch are worth buying, and the cost makes sense for the number of features provided.

We did some research on VMware and IBM Workload Automation.

We have connected this automation tool to our SAP ECC system. All the ECC batch jobs are scheduled via this tool.

We had configured the alerting mechanism so that whenever we have any job fails/long-running jobs, we get an immediate email notification which helps in monitoring the jobs.

The best part of the tool is the submit frame and time window where we can schedule jobs as per the customer's requirements.

As this has a quality environment, we connected this tool to ECC QA, and before making any changes to production, we are able to test the new requirements in quality then we can move to production. 

It helped to schedule and monitor the SAP ECC batch jobs.

It reduced the workload.

It can connect to a number of third-party/legacy systems. Once the job is scheduled, no manual interruption is required. Therefore, once the job is scheduled, there won't be any interruption to the job.

As we support the different countries in the project, we need to schedule jobs in different time zone; this tool helped to schedule the jobs as per the respective time zone because this tool contains almost all the time zones. We can schedule jobs as per the regional/country time.

The best feature is the alerting mechanism.

We had configured email alerts for many scenarios so that whenever a job fails/is long-running, we get an immediate email notification. There is no need to log in to the system every time and do the monitoring based on the email alert. We can inform the respective team and take action immediately. It helps to avoid business impact.

We get the best customer support; whenever we are doing any testing/facing any issues/during any new requirement, we can raise a ticket to the support team, or we can schedule a call with them so that we get an immediate response and solutions.

The monitoring dashboard could have been more user-friendly so that in the monitoring dashboard itself, we can see the total number of jobs created in the system and how many were currently active/scheduled/chained.

The reports could have more pre-defined options, such as killed/failed jobs from the current month. That way, we can get the reports quickly and help the audit process.  

Whenever any job fails in the system, it should be listed based on the priority of the job incident and should generate and assign it to the respective job owners.

I've used the solution for one to two years.

We did not use a different solution. 

The solution is easy to set up.

It offers very good value for money.

The license renewal activity is easy; the support team will provide the query we need to run it.

It does a little bit of everything. We have everything from console apps that our developers create to custom jobs built directly in ActiveBatch, which go through the process of moving data off of cloud servers, like SFTP, onto our on-premise servers so we can ingest them into other workflows, console apps, or whatever the business needs.

We use it company-wide. With us being a financial organization, we rely on a bunch of data from some of our parent companies that process transactions for us. We are able to bring all that data into our system, no matter what department it is from, e.g., we have things from the IT department that we want to do maintenance on, such as clearing out the logs in IAS on the Exchange Server, to being able to move millions of dollars with automation.

If there is a native tool for it, then we try to use it. We have purchased the SharePoint, VMware, and ServiceNow modules. Wherever we find that we can't connect in because the native APIs aren't there, we have been using PowerShell to strip those rows out into an array of variables that have worked pretty well. So far, we have not found a spot where we can't hook in to have it do the tasks that we are asking it to do.

We have only really tapped into SharePoint native integration because we haven't gotten to the depths of being able to use the ServiceNow and some of the other integrations. However, being able to use the native plugins has been very helpful. It saves us from having to write a PowerShell script to do the functionality that we are looking to do. We are really trained to write it, because within the old process that we used to use, we would do a lot of PowerShell as the old tool just wouldn't do what we're asking it to do. We are finding a lot of processes within ActiveBatch are now replacing those PowerShell scripts because ActiveBatch can just do it. We don't have to teach it how to do it.

We can do things within ActiveBatch, not having to teach it everything. That is the biggest thing that we've been learning with it: It's easy to use and its workflows work a lot better. The other day, we ran into a problem where Citrix ShareFile, which is one of our SFTP locations, was being stupid where it would disconnect from the SFTP server. It was all just a time out. Well, ActiveBatch has a process included where we can troubleshoot the connection failures and have itself heal enough to be able to get the data off of the SFTP server. Being able to discover the functionalities of ActiveBatch self-healing has been a lifesaver for us.

We have so many different processes out there with so many different schedules. My boss looked at it one day and noticed there was somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 processes a day. The solution gives us that single pane of glass to see everything under one spot because we have four execution agents constantly running, so there are processes happening at all times of the day and night.

We are actively monitoring all our ActiveBatch processes using SolarWinds Orion. If a process doesn't run, a service is not running on one particular execution agent, etc., Orion will alert us to that. I don't think that we have set up anything too major within ActiveBatch to figure out what is going on. I know that we have HA across everything. So, we are running four execution agents and two jobs schedulers. Having all that stuff put together, then it does failover to the other location if there is a problem with one of the sites.

The most valuable feature is being able to ingest some PowerShell scripting into variables that we can then utilize in loops. Our first rendition of doing PowerShell into variables was being able to pull some Active Directory computers using a PowerShell script and Active Directory PowerShell modules, then we were able to take that and dump it into a SharePoint list, because we keep inventory of all our servers. It was through the process of trying to understand how to get something out of PowerShell into an array and being able to process that out into something else that it would become useful down the road.

There are some things that ActiveBatch can't do natively, which is no fault to them. It's just the fact that we're trying to do things that just don't exist in ActiveBatch. With us being proficient in PowerShell scripting, we were able to extend the ActiveBatch environment to be able to say, "We'll run this PowerShell script and get the array that we're looking for, but then take that and do something native within ActiveBatch that can ultimately meet our goals."

The ease of use has been pretty good. I have been able to create workflows and utilize different modules within the job library, which has worked out really well. 

ActiveBatch's ability to automate predictable, repeatable processes is good. It does that very nicely. A lot of what we do is we pull files down from SFTP servers and put them onto our local file servers. Based on that, we are able to run a console app that developers have written, which is a lot more complicated, for doing various tasks. Our console apps are easy to set up because we have templates already drawn up. So, if we just right click into our task folder, we can quickly create an item in there that we can start up for doing an automation feature. Just being able to use PowerShell to drop variables into the ActiveBatch process has worked really well now that we understand it.

I know that there are some improvements that I have brought back to the development team that they want to work on. The graphical interface has some hiccups that we have been noticing on our side, and it seems a little bit bloated. 

While the console app works well, 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.

We did a proof of concept back in April.

We are in the process of migrating all our old processes over to ActiveBatch. The solution is in production, and we do have workloads on it.

It is pretty stable. Now that we have worked through the details and ensured that we can do a failover to let the process do what it needs to do, we haven't seen any problems with it.

We are about 90 percent done migrating our processes.

Right now, we have four execution agents, and they are sitting pretty idle for the most part. If we find that we're starting to see taxed resources on our execution agents, then we have the capability of spinning up more. So, we can run hundreds of servers and automation, if we wanted to.

There are only three of us who have been working with ActiveBatch, which is a good fit. We have one admin who is a developer first, then admin second. Then, there are two of us, who are server people first and developers second. All three of us manage all the different job libraries out there.

In the entire organization, there are about 1,300 of us using the different processes. A lot of people who would be more hands-on are the IT department, mainly because we are directly involved with all the different console apps. We have actually got a significant number of console apps, just because SCORCH couldn't do some of the things that ActiveBatch can do, so our developer teams went in and created the console app. At this point, all that ActiveBatch really needed to do was to be able to run an executable and provide an exit code on it, then let us know if it fails. There are some other business units who are involved a bit more along the way due to the movement of money, for example.

It is heavily used, at least in terms of what is out there. There is a lot of interest in adoption of using it in the future along with a lot of processes that people are really pushing to get put into ActiveBatch. They still have the mentality that a lot of it needs to be done as a console app. However, with us just ending the migration phase of things, we are trying to just get everything moved over so we can shut down the servers. Then, the next step in the future, probably 2021, we'll end up focusing on what ActiveBatch can do without us having to write a console app. 75 percent of the time, we could have ActiveBatch do it natively. There is just a matter of getting a lot of the IT developers to feel comfortable with adopting it as a platform.

I am working with them on their tech support. We have a customer advocate with whom we have been working. She has been awesome. We have had some issues where tech support will suggest one thing, then we are sitting there scratching our heads, going, "Do we really need to go that complicated on a solution?" Then, we reach out to our customer advocate, who comes back, saying, "No, this is how you really need to do it. I'm going to take this ticket and go train that tech support person. So, in the future, you don't get the answer you did." Therefore, their tech support is a bit rough around the edges, but I foresee in the next six months to a year, they will be on their game and able to provide exactly the answers within the timeframe that we expect.

We see ActiveBatch as the Center of Excellence for all things related to automation for our business. It is the best solution that we have had compared to what we were running before, which was Microsoft System Center Orchestrator (SCORCH). We don't want to have a whole bunch of different solutions out there. Being able to have one solution that can do all our automation is the best way to do it.

We switched over because of the intelligence. We were right in the middle of trying to decide whether we were going to upgrade SCORCH to the latest version or if it was time for us to go a different path. As we started going down through the different requirements that we needed SCORCH to do, we decided that it was time for us to go in a different direction. SCORCH had to be taught everything you wanted it to do, whereas there are a lot of processes that ActiveBatch will just go ahead and handle.

The performance is about the same between the two solutions in terms of doing what they are supposed to do. Where we really have the advantage is the fact that we don't have to reinvent the wheel, e.g., triggers within Active Batch are native and can be set up pretty quickly and easily. Whereas with SCORCH, we struggled with trying to get a schedule setup for that trigger or being able to rely on constraints. For example, if a file doesn't exist, then you really can't do anything. In SCORCH, we had to teach it that if you don't see a file, then hold on a second because we have to wait. Where ActiveBatch just says, "Oh, okay. I know how to do that."

In certain cases, ActiveBatch has resulted in an improvement in workflow completion times, because of the error retries. We can take care of them by telling ActiveBatch that if you have a problem, go ahead, try it again, and modify this. If the job runs at two o'clock in the morning and it failed with SCORCH, we always had to go back, figure out what happened, and how to get it run again. It might have been something as stupid as no network connection, because one of our upstream providers had an outage. Whereas, at least with ActiveBatch, we have been able to build in that self-healing or error detection. Once it sees the connection, it can go ahead and just correct the problem. For example, the Internet might go down from 2:00 AM to 2:15 AM, then by 2:30 AM, it's all back up and running. ActiveBatch can go ahead and finish the task. Where with SCORCH, we were finding that it would fail. Then, at seven o'clock in the morning, we got to troubleshoot any issues that might have come up. 

A lot of times, troubleshooting did not take very long, as it depended on the process. If it's something that could be downloaded from the SFTP, then that relied on several other steps that needed to take place. That might have delayed it a bit because we had to walk through five different processes that normally would have been scheduled to run at 3:00 AM versus 2:00 AM. So, if the Internet is out between 2:00 AM and 2:15 AM, ActiveBatch heals that first process before the second one runs at 3:00 AM. Then, we don't have to go through and do any added troubleshooting because step one didn't work, and step two failed because we can't troubleshoot it until we get up and start looking at it that day.

The initial setup was straightforward.

It took two to three hours to deploy, by the time we had all the intricacies done that we wanted.

We knew that we wanted it to be highly available in two data centers for DR purposes, because some of these processes move millions of dollars of money between accounts (in various pieces for wire transfers). I think HA was the big thing that we were trained to ensure that our strategy was based around. 

The only other strategy was the fact that we have multiple environments that we go through to test our solution out first. When we are done, we export/promote it up to the production environment.

The good part was that we really didn't have to do the install because we ended up getting a proof of concept setup with one of their engineers. So, we didn't have to do the initial setup ourselves, but we did build two other environments: one in our test environment and one in our development environment. Based on the fact that we walked through it the first time with the proof of concept, I was able to go back and reproduce every step that they walked us through on day one to build out the test and dev environments.

I have absolutely seen ROI. Coming from the admin point of view, it has streamlined the process of being able to just implement something instead of having to teach the software how to do its job. From our point, I know that I have implemented a couple of different processes that were not a migration piece, and it's been fairly easy for us to deploy because we know what the business unit wants to do with it. For us to implement, it takes us about 20 minutes to get it perfected on my side, then I can have developers run with it, test it, and figure out what their code was doing to make it happen. So, the biggest thing is that it is easy to use.

I know that there are enough processes out there that it's worth a gold mine. We can automate just about anything that we would ever want to. If we wanted the lights to turn on at a certain time, we could go ahead and turn the lights on at a certain time, and it would just happen.

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, then rerun it themselves. 

This solution improves our job success rate percentage. The biggest thing is having built-in capabilities of error detection, retries, and the ability to self-heal.

ActiveBatch has saved us man-hours. We don't have to rerun some of these scripts on behalf of the business unit. Or, if there is a script that fails, it can go ahead and self-heal, fixing itself. That is all unaccounted for troubleshooting time while helping our business units. 

The pricing was fair. 

There are additional costs for the plugins. We have the standard licensing fees for different pieces, then we have the plugins which were add-ons. However, we expected that.

We had a consultant come in and try to share with us all the different tools. However, there isn't a lot of competition out there for automation capabilities.

A major component was that the vendor is thinking five years ahead, looking to future-proof our business. When we were making our decision, we were either ready to go with either upgrading SCORCH or a different path. We wanted to be in connection with an organization who had a long-term plan. We didn't want to revisit this in one to three years down the road.

We have been able to learn it pretty quickly. We were kind of thrown right in after we got the proof of concept up and going. We had a couple of use cases drawn up and implemented, and they showed us how to do it. Our boss ended up buying the software, and said, "Ready, set, go. We're going to start migrating all these different processes over." We really didn't get time to learn it. Based on what we knew about our previous application that we were using for automation, we were able to step right in and do the best we could. We have been doing weekly, one- to two-hour sessions where three of us get together, just understand the solution, and try to work through all the details. We have been able to learn it pretty quickly without having too much training or knowledge.

We have gone through and given the business units a demo of what the possibilities are for sharing knowledge and ideas. At the end of the day, there is a team of three of us who are actually implementing all the processes so we keep a kind of standard. However, to give a business unit an idea of what the functionality is and how we could best utilize it, we at least give them the 30,000 foot view of what ActiveBatch could do, then we build it.

We mainly use it for console apps, but we haven't explored them in real depth. I know that we could get even deeper. At some point down the road, a lot of the console apps that our developer teams create will more than likely become native ActiveBatch processes which we will no longer need the console apps to run.

For the admins, the biggest lesson learnt would be in those first 30 days going through and learning through the Academy. They have an online Academy that they have out on their website. The biggest struggle that we had was just the fact that we were trying to do this migration not knowing all the different features of the software. We ran into trouble where we would try and implement something (and we wanted to do it by best practices because we want to get it right the first time), but there were features that we were discovering along the way that we had no idea about until all of a sudden we needed that feature. Then, we would go back, and go, "Oh, you know what? That last procedure that we just implemented. It would've been really cool if we would have known that at the time."

If we would have taken the first 30 to 60 days, or even a week long crash course, in ActiveBatch development to get all the highlights of everything that the software could physically do, that would have helped us immensely just to make sure that we knew what was going on and how it worked. We probably would have implemented some of our migrations a little differently than we have them done today. So, we will have to circle back and revisit some of those processes and reinvent them.

Take that time and learn the solution. Make sure you understand the software, at least at a higher level, maybe not the 30,000 foot view, but maybe the 1,000 foot view and get through the Academy first. Once you get through the Academy, then you can go ahead and start implementing the job libraries and how you want it to lay out and be implemented. Even after nine months of working with the software, we're still discovering features that we wish we would have known nine months ago coming into the migration.

I would probably rate the software as a nine and a half or 10. I would rate the tech support as probably a six, but they are improving immensely. If I had to give it an overall score, I would go with an eight (out of 10).

We use it for a variety of different tasks, most of which are related to data management tasks, such as scheduling, processes related to updating business intelligence reporting, or general data management stuff. It's also used for some low level file transfers and mergers in some cases. 

We use the solution for execution on hybrid machines, across on-prem, and cloud systems. We have code that it is executed on a cloud environment, various Windows and Unix servers.

We are on version 11, moving to version 12 later this year.

We found that the solution created simplicity for us with our workflows and process automation. It gives me the folder and job name, then I'm done. I don't have to remember a plethora of things and that makes life a lot easier. Once you get it setup and have it configured, you don't have to remember it anymore. It allows you to focus on doing the right thing. 

I find it super flexible. Every time that I ask if the solution can do something, they say, "Yes." I have not been able to come up with a challenge so far that they have not been able to do.

It definitely allows the ability to develop the workflow. It has reduced the amount of coding. Some groups don't pay attention to that, as they are very much an old school group. I am trying to get people to do things differently, but that's just changing habits.

One process may at some point time run across five different servers in parellel before coming back to a final point of finishing. They built that in, where it say, "Every time we do certain things, execute this package." All I have to do is drag that package into the master package and master plan. It's very modular. 

All our workflows are efficient. This solution allows for tighter integrations across environments where you don't necessarily want developers cross pollinating each others' code. It's more or less about securing code. I have people who are experts in doing PowerCenter. They don't have any idea what they're doing in other solutions. You don't want them accidentally editing the wrong code. Therefore, it helps keep related things isolated, but allows them to communicate.

For code maintenance, it's really simplified it. For things that are coded, like day-to-day Unix or Windows level batch type jobs, this means I don't have to rewrite the code and I can easily migrate it from the environment. I can do this by leveraging variables and naming practices. I can basically develop code, do development, migrate it through our four environments, and not made changes to the code at all. It makes the environmental passback of an SDLC process seamless.

One of the great features that they have implemented is called Job Steps. It is a much more mechanical way to control processes. It allows us to connect to external providers. For example, we were a big Informatica shop. The development time to create a job that can execute a task or workflow (once you have the initial baseline set up) takes you about a minute to say, "I created this new job in Informatica. I have created an equivalent job to run the batch, then about a minute later, it was done." It improves the development time to market and getting things done.

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.

Improvement in workflow completion times has to do with optimization. The ability to do true parallel submittal of jobs, then be able to pay attention to the status of those job simultaneously to know when they are done, that is what creates the optimization.

The solution provides us with a single pane of glass for end-to-end visibility of workflows. It has a very broad, deep scale vision of what's going on. You can go down to an individual job level or see across the whole system and different groups. Because we roll out by project area, each project has their own root group folder that they use to manage their routines. We don't have a master operational group yet that is managing it. Therefore, each of group does its own operational support for it. However, if I look at things in it, there are a lot of shared things that we have put in there. If a machine is taking too long, I can go focus on that. E.g., why is it taking so long? Then, I can let people know that we have a particular routine that is running poorly.

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. This has been my challenge.

I have been using this solution since 2007: 13 years.

The stability is rock solid. The four failures that we have had are related to issues we've done to our server or environment. Mostly, they are self-inflicted failures. There was a bit of cross pollination for what we were doing with security procedures where we experienced interruption. ActiveBatch hadn't updated itself directly to handle that situation.

We use the solution’s API extensibility. It has helped with the stability. It allows us to know when a job fails. If there's a problem connecting to a server or a job fails because something has gone wrong with a server, then we know very quickly. 

Four people are needed for development and maintenance of this solution. I am the primary admin but I don't support the solution on a day-to-day basis. I have a secondary gentleman, who like me, is also an admin. There are two others who primarily deal with the database. There's not a lot to it, except for the log stuff. When it comes to individual job failures, that's not our domain. That's the domain of each group maintaining their space. We also manage security issues.

We are not the biggest shop out there. In our production environment, there are about 10 group who are doing work on a daily basis. Our user base is primarily developers and a few technical business analysts. There are approximately 50 to 100 users.

We have administrators, operations people, and developers. Administrators have full control across all environments. Operators have the ability to execute and see things across many of the environments. Developers can only work on a nonproduction event. 

For what we are doing on a relatively modest machine, ActiveBatch hasn't had any issues.

I haven't had to scale it yet. It has been a simple server for 13 to 14 years now. I haven't had to go to multicluster. We have a failover setup. However, we don't use that for parallel processing. It is more just for failing. 

I'm on a first name basis with many of their engineers and developers. I have passed on some challenging things since my history goes so far back. They have always been very responsive to answering questions and providing the right knowledge base article. They are open to suggestions and very interactive.

We first implemented this a number of years ago, it took our processes from several hours overnight, and not knowing if those jobs failed until we checked in the morning, to having an ActiveBatch team as an overnight team who watched jobs for us. Though, sometimes they would take an hour or two before they realized something had failed. Now, we have it so that team is responding within minutes. The alerting that texts and emails you has improved our ability to respond in a timely fashion.

We installed versions 5, 6, 8, 9, and 11. Upgrades have always been seamless. It has been able to recognize code from previous versions, even 10 years ago, and update it.

Every time we do a redeployment, we go through the same process. We develop, upgrade the dev environment, and have people check to make sure their job still work. We then take that environment and migrate it to our test environment where we totally check it. That usually goes faster because we are just moving the database forward, checking to make sure everything works, and then moving onto the next page. Typically, we do a new server for production. We don't upgrade in place. I've done the upgrade in place without a problem in the dev environment, and it does go faster. I find it very clean, and I've not had a problem. Most of the issues are related to consumers of the tool.

We have only used it in one scenario. It took us a bit of time to get it setup as we have two halves of our processes. One is the data management process that happens multiple times a day. When that is completed, we want see reporting based on these processes. What we have is an event base that is executable. The viewable data sets are in different folders so these two groups don't actually see each other. That is routine, but they are able to read and have scheduled events.

I installed it. To install it and get the environment up and running, it takes less than a day. Once my database is up and I have access to install the software, it takes an hour or two for me to get it up and running.

Over the years that I have used this, it has probably saved us several hundred hours of development time for other teams and my own. 

The solution has absolutely resulted in an improvement in job success rate percentage. We can see what the problems are and isolate them sooner. We are able to catch these problems and alert people.

It allows for lower operational overhead.

I buy features when I have need of them.

Right now, we only use the Informatica AI and Informatica PowerCenter. We are looking at  a ServiceNow integration. Some of the other ones, like Azure, we don't need right now as we continue to grow it organically. It's more as teams migrate technologies. We want to have an opportunity to have a conversation with them, and say, "Hey, come in and do it this way."

We are not using all the features yet. E.g. we don't use any load balancing variables.

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