Control-M Valuable Features

WB
Maintenance Manager at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees

A new feature, which we deployed about two years ago, is the Managed File Transfer (MFT). We also use Managed File Transfer Enterprise (MFTE) for external transfers of our biggest use cases. 

Another valuable feature would definitely be the MFT dashboard that is now available in Control-M natively. It is easy to just search for jobs, files, etc. Instead of the customers contacting us to find out what happened, when it happened, and why it happened, they are able to service themselves. This allows us to cut down on operational staff, costs, and time because customers can manage it themselves to a degree.

The most valuable feature is definitely the Self Service. A couple of years ago, it was available, but not with the features that it is today. There wasn't really uptake on it, although it was available. We have seen a steady growth in the number of users using it and what they are using it to do. They are using Self Service to schedule by themselves and do monitoring by themselves. They interact with their schedules. Also, the performance of Self Service is very user-friendly and more accessible. That is one of the features that we use a lot lately.

The reporting has definitely improved over the years. We are definitely doing more of that as well. We are definitely seeing more value in reporting on the batch schedules, optimizing it and seeing if we can cut costs. 

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AS
Subject Matter Expert at a consumer goods company with 10,001+ employees

Control-M Workload Archiving is a very good feature for us. It helps with our customer requirements in terms of reporting and auditing. We have internal audits every quarter, and every six months we have external audits. During these audits, the auditors get historical data through Control-M. Previously, when we didn't have any archive server, we managed the data in Control-M with man-made scripts, and we would pull the data for the last 365 days, or three or four months back. Since we installed the archiving, we have been able to pull the data, anytime and anywhere, with just one click.

Control-M gives us a unified view where we can easily define, orchestrate, and monitor all our application workflows and data pipelines. We are mostly using SAP and other business warehouse jobs, and we can easily see the systems through Control-M. It gives us a very good view of geographical data. If I go through the Web Services to show things to my customers, they are very satisfied with the Control-M views. They can check historical data and they can see the current view. They can easily pull these up. We are satisfied with the fact that, with one click, we can see all the applications within one view.

Our line-of-business personnel use Control-M’s web interface to support their business initiatives. One of our big applications is our JG application, where a user needs a data pipeline and Power BI jobs with refreshed data. Instead of the user having to send a request to our Control-M team, they can use the Web Services directly to check their data. If they're using an iPad or a desktop, they can easily check on it themselves. They're not dependent on the Control-M team directly. We educate users on how to check things and how to pull the reports. It is very easy to use. Also, we don't have 24/7 support within our company. Suppose a user needs something at midnight. They don't have to wait for the Control-M admin team to give them the report. They can directly pull the details.

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RS
Sr. Automation Engineer at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I am a big proponent of an automation API and Jobs-as-Code. That is Control-M in the DevOps world. It opens up the tool to a traditional operations tool. Developers can jump right in there now, giving them that ownership, and integrating the existing DevOps tools that they have. That is a huge feature that I just love. 

There's an application integrator. It doesn't matter if you're trying to integrate with on-premises, off-premises, API, container, or serverless functions, it's easy for you to design. You just design that integration and then it's available instantly, and that's a huge time saver. 

It's rather easy to create, integrate and automate data pipelines with Control-M. I can give a broad answer. It can be as easy as drag and drop, or it can be as complex as designing the integrations. If you use customization, you can access a data lake that your organization developed. For the typical user out there, the difference is on a scale of one to five, with one being easy and five being hard, you're probably looking at a two and a half. For most people, it's very easy. It's getting easier as it's all web-based nowadays. Alternatively, it can be all code-based.

I have not explored Python Client too much. I've tinkered with it and that's been the limit of my exploration. Now, with the integrations like AWS, we've made extensive use of it, and it is very easy for anybody to do. Python Client has a lot of great possibilities, especially in the data science arena, however, sadly we have not had an opportunity as of yet to play with it.

The Control-M interface for creating, monitoring, and ensuring delivery of files as parts of your data pipeline has gotten better. It is not perfect. That said, it’s come a long way over the years. Nowadays, most of it is web-driven. A lot of it can be API driven if you so wish. There's still probably some future work to be done there, however, for the average user that's coming in, starting to use it for the first time, they're going to need a little training and handholding at the beginning for maybe the first week or so. Then you can start setting them free to go out and use it on their own.

The orchestration of our data pipelines and workflows has been able to give a single point of view too. Management doesn’t care about the bits and pieces. A workflow or a data pipeline could have 100 or 1,000 components behind it, and management does not care about that. Management cares whether the SLA has been met or not. They want that easy-to-see red light or green light. We can provide them with that. The solution drives self-service and it helps. A manager doesn't have to call somebody in IT and wait around for an answer.

They can immediately get that information for themselves, consume it and be able to understand that, "Hey, you know what, this data pipeline over here, we're going to be 15 minutes off our SLA for today." Then, they can start asking why. I like parts of Control-M like Batch SLA Impact, is they can start doing some of that analysis themselves, for example, “this late due to the fact that maybe the system was down for maintenance for two hours last night." That's really beneficial in today's business world.

The automation of Control-M has sped up everything. We can integrate directly into existing pipelines and the DevOps teams can get anything integrated with their Jenkins deployments. They don't have to wait for traditional operation functions. This is all built-in. It validates and checks. In some cases, it automatically deploys the agents and deploys the configurations. That's something that years ago you'd have to wait for. The speed of delivery has vastly improved.

Nowadays, auditing is as simple as running a report. If this falls under an auditable category, we can just hit a button and the report is done. Control-M audits everything, even if it is not under the regulatory or audit spotlight. Every process, every movement, and every change is logged by the system. If there's ever a question, you’ll be able to find a why and a when. There’s an audit trail.

It certainly helped speed processes up. I can eliminate what I call the manual gaps between certain features. I don't have to send an email to somebody to say, "Hey, guess what? That file's ready. Now you can run process X, Y, Z." The system just says "Hey, the file is there, let's go." It's eliminated those gaps between parts of the workflow. It also helped optimize the infrastructure needed as it's like a Tetris Puzzle. I have these ten different workflows that I'm trying to run and before I may have had ten dedicated systems for them. Now I know that I don't need that.

We use this model all the time. We can run those ten processes on three systems and be just fine. That saves money. The solution is not only speedy, but it also saves money.

They are doing a great job with continuing to drive the open-source model of it. Five years ago, if you looked for Control-M anywhere, you would not have found it. Today, that model has changed. They're actively publishing on GitHub.

You can download for free an entire container and run Control-M at home if you want to tinker with it. That was unheard of a few years ago. You can type a query in Google and start to see all sorts of documentation that is now available to the public. The major strides that they have made there are pretty darn good.

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Buyer's Guide
Control-M
April 2024
Learn what your peers think about Control-M. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: April 2024.
767,847 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Chris Wahl - PeerSpot reviewer
Operations Engineer at West Bend Mutual Insurance Company

The reporting is top-notch. I haven't found any other applications on the market that can replicate what Control-M offers. The alerting is very good, and I think their service monitoring is the best in the industry. 

The solution is a key part of our system and I have not seen any significant limitations with it. It's very reliable and performs as advertised.

We're just starting our data pipeline journey. Compared to other products in the market, I believe Control-M's is the easiest to use. Theirs came out ahead in terms of ease of use every time. I rate them very highly in that area. We're primarily an Azure corporation. We found that the solution's built-in integrations with Azure are straightforward to use.

We actively build out methods of alerting, for instance, when workflows in Control-M don't complete, as this impacts our end-users and our managers that support the teams attempting to provide data for the end-users. I think Control-M has a ton of built-in integrations that make alerting when that data is unavailable more visible to end-users. I think that's been very useful in our environment.

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AL
IT Supply Chain Manager at Alicorp

First of all, the shift from manual to automation has been valuable. We have a tool that can automate.

The second valuable feature is that there have been many benefits, which we have been utilizing little by little.

The third valuable feature is that there is a good support team. They have solved things that other companies have not done. When it comes to IBP, because it is SaaS, it was not easy for our team, but we received good support. At first, there were also issues regarding the functionality of SolMan. We saw that it was not going to work, so we did not go live with that, but they told us that there was going to be a new version where the ticket would be generated almost automatically. Because they were releasing a technical issue that would allow us to generate a job automatically and generate a ticket in a simpler way, we waited for that upgrade to be released, and it indeed was like that. Such continuous support is very valuable because it is not a tool that does not progress. They are constantly releasing things and allowing it to grow and cover more functionalities.

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Pedro Fuentes - PeerSpot reviewer
System Engineer at Community Loans of America, Inc.

In Helix Control-M, we have the automation API that allows us to customize and do integrations easily in any script, such as Java or Python. It is all integrated within the integration API.

Every year, they add another set of automation or compatibility with different applications. They are capable of integrating with Informatica, AWS, etc. You can schedule queries directly from Control-M on databases without having a server or agent. You can do scan jobs or queries directly. Every other month, they are doing releases, and they have tons of new integrations, which makes it compatible with more and more applications around the cloud.

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EY
IT MSP at Ryerson
  • The monitoring
  • Workflows
  • Production
  • Scheduling the shifts
  • Timeframes for specific roles and management

Time differences are important because we have some overseas clients. That is why we are using Batch Impact Manager for the Control-M, which is very helpful for us. It detects potential blocks in advance, delays, and errors. That helps us to optimize the scheduling, then the batch workload processing as well. 

It is pretty easy to create, integrate, and automate data pipelines. It is user-friendly, not rocket science. That is what I like about the Control-M, and specifically Batch Impact Manager. You will need some orientation and need to know what you are doing if you are integrating your system, and this solution makes it easier.

We use Control-M Python Client and cloud data service integrations with GCP, which is pretty hassle-free. There aren't any problems or compliance issues. It is pretty easy to retrieve the data, do conversions, etc. They are on-time, and there is not much of a delay. 

The engineers on our team say that it is pretty easy to build, test and promote data workflows with the data coding language integrated into Control-M through the Control-M automation API. The ease of integration is eight out of 10. Python is the main language that our database managers and data engineers are using along with some other languages. 

The Control-M interface is user-friendly and easy to use. Orientation-wise, it is easy for data engineers to adapt.

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BB
ITSM Implementation Manager at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees

The most valuable features are the scheduling aspects of the tool and to have everything scheduled and automated to be able to run on a set timeframe.

It's important to our work because we can set it and forget it. We don't have to worry about logging in and pulling that data every day or manipulating the data. It can be run on a schedule and then the proper timing after dependencies are run.

Control-M provides us with a unified view where we can easily define, orchestrate, and monitor all of our application workflows and data pipelines. It's not super important in my particular line, but it is important for the operations and scheduling team that use the tool.

We use mobile interfaces. They allow the development teams to be able to go in and set up the jobs that they need to schedule them accordingly. There's still quite a bit of a gap between the two tools. So, a lot of our users still prefer to use the desktop client.

We use Control-M to integrate our file transfers within our application workflows. But we do not use the BMC MFT program. We use a different third-party file transfer tool.

The ability to integrate file transfers has been instrumental in allowing us to accomplish the things we need with Control-M. In our industry, we take a lot of data and either push it down to the stores or retail grocery stores. We take files and push them down to the stores or pull files and information from the stores and bring it back to corporate. So, it's two-way communication with file transfers. One of the bigger things that we do with Control-M is scheduling data moves and moving data from one location to another.

We also use Control-M to streamline our data and analytics projects. It's not doing any automation now. That would be done with the tools that it feeds, like Cognos or other reporting tools. It just collects data for us.

The integrated guides and how-to videos in the solution's web interface are okay for some of the basic user questions that we get for how to use the tool and do some of the basics, but from an admin standpoint, which is what I'm responsible for with my team, they're not very helpful. We still go back to BMC Docs, open tickets when we need to, and things of that nature to get the information.

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HK
AVP - Systems Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

The File Transfer component is quite valuable. The integration with products such as Informatica and SAP is very valuable to us as well. Rather than having to build our own interface into those products, we can use the ones that come out of the box. The integration with databases is valuable as well. We use database jobs quite a bit. The file watcher component is also indispensable when integrating with other applications that generate files, instead of triggering a workflow based on time.

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Shane Bailey - PeerSpot reviewer
Automation Engineer at CARFAX

Our ability to integrate with many different solutions has been invaluable. The new approach of the automation API and jobs-as-code is also valuable.

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RS
Sr. Automation Engineer at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Among the most valuable features are

  • the measuring and monitoring of the SLAs, the service level agreements—they code in recovery actions for when things go wrong
  • the single pane of glass enables us to see everything, all the processes, in one place
  • the ability to integrate with all sorts of different platforms and services.

It provides a unified view where you can orchestrate and monitor all your application workloads and data pipelines. That's very important because with cloud, software as a service, edge computing, traditional data center, and legacy apps, there are all these environments. If you don't have that single pane of glass or that one place to look at, you're going to invest a lot of time and resources into tracking things down when they go wrong. You really need that single pane of glass to show you what's going on across all your disparate systems, in one location.

We also have Control-M for internal and external file transfers. It's really just a part of our normal, everyday procedures. It makes sure that they happen. It makes sure that we got the files. It makes sure that data has flowed back to the appropriate departments.

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Balabrahmam Chakka - PeerSpot reviewer
Integration Administrator at Sainsbury's Supermarkets Ltd

All our Control-M alerts go to our internal automation.

It has two-way integration. We now have a ServiceNow integration. 

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KV
Sr Integration Developer at a computer software company with 5,001-10,000 employees

I find Control-M for SAP and Control-M for Informatica good. You can connect to the Linux or Windows servers, and you can run multiple jobs. 

Control-M Managed File Transfer is also a very nice feature for transferring multiple files.

It meets our requirements, and it is simple and easy to use. 

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Matt L. - PeerSpot reviewer
Batch Analyst at Ferrellgas Partners, L.P.

Monitoring and planning are critical to my day-to-day work. Monitoring is for the active schedule and Planning is where you make scheduling changes on a more permanent basis. My roles have spanned multiple functions. I've been an operator, where you have to watch the active schedule in the Monitoring domain. I've been a scheduler, where you use Planning and do your work based on scheduling requests. And I've been an admin, where you use Configuration Manager and make sure that the product is installed and behaving properly. All three are equally important.

Control-M is excellent when it comes to building, scheduling, managing, and monitoring production workflows. Those workflows are of very high importance to our operations.

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GM
Control-M Administrator at Cognizant

The GUI is very user-friendly. It provides us with a single view and we have everything in the same UI. This is very important because we don't spend a lot of time switching tabs or opening Control-M for different purposes. We have a single GUI open and it saves a lot of time.

Two really helpful features are Forecast and Business Impact Manager (BIM).

BIM is helpful because we do not miss any SLAs, as we get to know the issue well in advance. It is the topmost service that has helped us provide better solutions for the business.

Forecast is useful in terms of patching, etc, because whenever we are looking for downtime or any team is looking for downtime, it's easy for us to use Forecast to find it.

Self-service is helpful and our business users appreciate it because they don't have to have Control-M installed on their machine. They can log in using the web portal.

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YN
DevOps Expert at Saint-Gobain ADFORS CZ s.r.o.

The most valuable feature of Control-M is the collaboration. We can all work together on it and have a better view of things with the dashboard, and that's true even for business users. The unified view where you can define, orchestrate, and monitor applications, workflows, and data pipelines is important because we have more than one team working on Control-M. We have a support team, a job-creation team, and a SAP team. We can all work together on it. It avoids anyone from working on his part and not using the latest modifications. In case there is an issue, we know who made the mistake, and we can also roll back the mistake. That is very good.

Our line-of-business personnel use Control-M's web interface. We have tried the mobile application, but we haven't used it enough. The web interface is very good. Previously, a business user would ask us, "What about my file?" Now that we have Control-M, they are up to date on it. The self-service portal is very helpful because it gives them a view of the latest version of the interface and they can consult it without having to ask us every morning about a given operation.

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Issam OUASSOU - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Consultant IT at Société Générale Maroc

The most valuable feature is the monitoring, which allows me to see the execution and results of each of the scripts.

Being able to view the history is very important because if we have a problem then that is where we search for the details.

From an administrative perspective, the planning domain is very important when we want to add a new feature or a new script.

The forecast domain is what we used to ensure that the implementation is working and that the configuration is okay.

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Nagarajan Sankarammal - PeerSpot reviewer
Automation Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

The product has improved dramatically over the years; it offers a lot in terms of features and capabilities and integration with third-party tools. A wide range of models available with the product is critical in reducing manual and mundane work such as custom script writing. This saves significant amounts of time and, by association, money for the organization.

As a Control-M user for over 15 years, I see it as very straightforward to create, integrate, and automate data pipelines. Even in the beginning, when Control-M was more of a data architecture product, it was easy to pick up. I've seen multiple people adapting very well in terms of adapting and enabling the capabilities of the solution for business; it's straightforward. 

Ideally, agent lift modes of connectivity would be established on different platforms. We can get applications integrated directly with Control-M. That's a recent feature. There are ready-made platforms and plugins which allow us to see templates for workflow orchestration in third-party and custom in-house applications. It's a straightforward solution, and this is an area where Control-M excels.  

Our customers are pleased being with Control-M, despite some minor hiccups, which happen with any solution. They have been happy with the product for years, and it's an enterprise-wide batch workflow orchestration tool. That's how it is established in our organization and what our users are satisfied and familiar with. 

The process execution speed is excellent and has constantly improved over the years.

The bottom line is Control-M is a mission-critical solution, it's integral to our organization. 

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KK
Director Information Technology at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

There isn't a single feature that is most valuable, but if I had to choose one, it would be the rich ability it gave us for making customized scripts. That was probably the most unique feature set for our situation. We used Control-M's Python Client and cloud data service integrations with AWS and, as a feature, it was very customizable. It gave us a lot of flexibility for customizing whatever data maneuver we wanted to do within a pipeline.

The Python Client and cloud data service integrations have a rich set of features with flexibility. It did not require additional, crazy skills or experience to deal with it. It was a nice transition into enabling a data scientist to leverage existing skills to build those pipelines.

Creating, integrating, and automating data pipelines with Control-M was straightforward. It did require some knowledge and training, but compared to other solutions, it was a lot simpler. Working with data workflows, with the data-coding language integrated into Control-M, was straightforward. The level of difficulty was somewhere between "medium" and "easy." It was not that hard to leverage existing skills and knowledge within this specific feature.

The user interface for creating, monitoring, and ensuring delivery of files as part of the data pipeline was very actionable. It was almost self-explanatory. Somebody with basic user-interface experience could navigate the calls to action and the configuration that is required. It was well-designed.

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LP
SAP Solution Manager and Control-M Admin at a wholesaler/distributor with 10,001+ employees

Cost-wise, it is good. It is an enterprise tool that integrates with all the applications in our organization. It has made our life easier because we don't need to wake up at midnight and do monitoring, etc. It does everything. It also sends precautionary alerts. If a job or activity is running for more than the specified time, it alerts the application team. So, our teams do not need to sit in front of a laptop or any open application to watch the jobs. They can do their other regular activities while Control-M takes care of all the jobs. It notifies them when there is job completion, delay, and error.

When we migrated to the SAP ERP application, a lot of jobs got created. We had to do all the things manually and monitor round the clock. Control-M has made our life easier. We can now concentrate on our applications and other tasks.

Since we have got this product in our company, our life has become easier. We don't require much L1 and L2 monitoring and support. We don't have L1 support when it comes to the Control-M application. We do have an L2 team application support, but it is minimal.

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RS
Sr. Systems Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

The capabilities of auditing have been great. 

The ease of use is one of its great aspects. It's very easy to use and very easy to pick up. 

It's got an excellent graphical interface. I haven't seen that in anything else that I've looked at, however, that said, I haven't looked at many lately. 

I know that in 20 years, I have had probably two problems where I've had to call the company to get immediate assistance from them, where we had a system down or something. Its performance is very reliable.

It integrates with other applications. You can use PowerShell, you can use Perl, you can use whatever. It doesn't really care. It's just running a process.

The product scales quite well.

Technical support is very helpful and available 24/7.

The stability is excellent.

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SS
IT - VP at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

The most valuable feature is the Self Service tool. They have metrics in place almost all across the pipeline, which is really nice. 

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AB
Architect at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

I like the interface, including how I can see everything and how I can put the jobs together. Depending on the experience, I can either use the GUI or I can use the command line to create jobs based on JSON scripts. It provides that flexibility for someone who has no experience of using Control-M as well as with someone who's a full-blown developer that can get very complex with creating these jobs. Generally, it provides a good interface for everyone with different levels of experience.

Control-M doesn't really process data as far as I can tell. It orchestrates other scripts. From what I understand, Control-M doesn't really ingest or analyze any data. It's a tool to help with the processing of data on different platforms. I can tell it to run a script on one server, to send the data over to another SQL server, or a different platform, Power BI for example, and run a script on Power BI so that it can ingest the data when it gets there and do what it needs to do. Once that's finished, I can send it to another platform to put a dashboard together based on when that data is available.

Once one understands the process of how it functions, it's pretty simple and straightforward to create, integrate, and automate the pipelines. There is a learning curve to understand how it all works, all the components, and all the requirements for parameters and different options. However, it's pretty simple once someone has a basic understanding of how it all works.

The Control-M interface is good for creating, monitoring, and ensuring the delivery of files as part of our data pipeline. There's a wealth of information in both the full client, as well as the web interface that they have. Both are very easy to use and provide all the necessary material to understand how to do various tasks. The help feature is very useful and informative and everything is very easy to understand.

It’s great that Control-M orchestrates all our workflows, including file transfers, applications, data sources, data pipelines, and infrastructure with plugins. There are a lot of plugins and we haven't used all of them yet. Primarily, we've only used the file transfer plugin, the Azure file service, and Azure functions. Primarily, the developers have used that to put the various tasks and workloads in place. While we haven't fully utilized everything in Control-M yet, we're learning how to use the various functionalities and transitioning from our legacy scripts and data sources. 

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SL
Project Manager at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees

The integration with ServiceNow is good. When a job ends and there are problems with it, we automatically open an incident in this platform, and the number of the incident is forwarded to Control-M. This means that we have a record of it with the log of the job. This is a feature that reduces manual work. It is not officially included in Control-M; rather, it was developed for us by BMC.

The web interface supports us well because we have done some customization for each area of our company, and the client can see all of the jobs that they are interested in seeing. One can watch their flow on a phone or tablet. For example, we have integration with WeLink and our clients can see the flow of the billing workflow.

We use Control-M as part of our DevOps automation, and for our company, this is very important because it reduces the amount of work that has to be done. We are a very big company and we have millions of jobs scheduled. The more that we can automate, the better it is for us.

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SM
Senior Associate at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

The most beneficial features are the Forecast option and Archiving feature, as well as the integration option with other applications and tools to the API. When it comes to the API integration with any third-party tool, we can integrate using the application integrator tool and API interface with web APIs, which is the best part. Control-M has its own Forecast solution. Therefore, we can forecast how many jobs are going to run, on which day, and at what time. Another benefit is the tool's Archiving feature. So, we had a lot of requirements, like when an application or end user team would say that they want to see the log or output of the job from two or three months before. So, the archive solution is very helpful because we can keep at least a year's worth of data for our environment.

It has a very good GUI. We can search for a job very easily. The web interface, user account creation, and access control are very good. From an access control point of view, we can provide access to as many users as we want. A second group of users can be given a certain number of features, according to the requirements. The web interface is very easy for end users to login and use. A lot of features have been added, e.g., adding jobs. They can add jobs to their stuff, whatever they want, then get it validated by the scheduling team and work it into production.

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DU
Operations Support Analyst at a retailer with 5,001-10,000 employees

The scheduling is quite easy to use and pretty robust.

Control-M provides us with a unified view, where we can easily define, orchestrate, and monitor all our application workflows and data pipelines. It also provides the ability to filter. So, if I don't want to see everything, I can also narrow it down or open ViewPoint. This is very important since we have thousands of jobs to monitor. If we did not have this ability, it would be very difficult to see what is going on.

It is easy to use, and you can set things up very quickly. We can copy jobs, making copies of the existing configurations and setup. 

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MG
Computer Production Support Tech at a government with 10,001+ employees

We can set up automated email notifications to the programmers or the whole team for a particular job. It helps save time because we're not consistently looking at the job to see if it has ended or failed.

The Control-M interface makes delivering files in our data pipeline a little easier. The integration is so much more seamless, so the transition is a smoother experience.

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SD
IT Operations Specialist at a retailer with 5,001-10,000 employees

The most valuable features are the Advanced File Transfer and the managed file transfer. They make transferring files securely seamless. It's very easy to set up, get deployed, and have it transferred to and from vendors. As long as we can get our firewall rules implemented at a decent time, it's very easy and seamless to get important files transferred in a secure manner.

Control-M has automated critical processes. We run a lot of our backups through Control-M, daily sales reporting, and warehouse initiatives with shipping and planning. There are a bunch of finance processes that go through here that are time-critical. It's made everything more streamlined and secure and it comes through much quicker than doing it manually.

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Richard Meyer - PeerSpot reviewer
System Engineer at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

The automation is one of the most valuable features.

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Ramesh Subudhi - PeerSpot reviewer
Analyst at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Multiple software can be collaborated through Control-M, then we can seamlessly monitor when it goes into production after a scheduled daily or monthly deployment. Even though we don't have any privileges to change these jobs, we can monitor them with read access and see how they are being executed. We can also verify their dependencies and see the logs. If there are any failures, we can get the logs from Control-M and fix them in the development environment, in the cases that are required to be done as soon as possible. It provides a complete picture about how the batches are running in production.

We have a lot of things that need to be considered. Everything needs to be done one after another in Control-M, where it provides us a pictorial representation of job dependencies, and even a person without technical knowledge can understand it by looking at the pictorial representation of jobs. So, we can provide the exact time when it can start. Then, we can update the users about the expected time for the job's completion. In case of any delays, we can understand them, then provide a new ETA to the users. Without Control-M, it would be difficult to provide these estimates.

We are using the web interface. We are not going through the mobile because we are a bank. Everything we do is through our laptops, not through a mobile. The web interface supports our business initiatives well. Whenever we want to see the updates, we need to connect to Control-M. We know what needs to be monitored and verify them depending on what their dependencies are. If the batch is still running, we can understand the historical information, then calculate and provide an ETA to users.

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ST
Junior Unix Specialist at Oy Samlink Ab

Multiple scheduling options allow you to do anything you want, whenever you want, and however you want. You can easily be in control when things happen.

Control-M provides us with a unified view where we can easily define, orchestrate, and monitor all our application workflows and data pipelines. This is quite important because I am our Control-M administrator. So, it is pretty important to me personally, but also for the company. It may not yet be quite in the center of our business, but we are clearly using Control-M as our main scheduling program.

View full review »
DG
Administrator at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • The reporting facility is very helpful in creating reports for auditing. 
  • The FTP function is very easy to use.
  • It is simple to create, integrate, and automate data pipelines and to ingest data from different platforms. It integrates well between platforms.
  • The Control-M interface is also very easy and very comprehensive. It's pretty simple to navigate through all the different functions.

It's very important for us that Control-M orchestrates all our workflows. And the plugins have enhanced what we already have.

View full review »
BK
Electrical Engineer at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

The web interface is handy. It's easy to use, and Control-M provides you with the necessary materials to understand the features and perform various tasks.

The interface is user-friendly. I had no prior experience, but I found it easy to work with. I had to review lots of documentation, but it's not difficult to navigate the different applications on it.

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AK
Tech lead at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

The File Watcher utility, cyclic jobs, and email alert notification are valuable.

View full review »
EA
System Engineering Manager at a marketing services firm with 10,001+ employees

The scheduler allows you to pretty much run anything from anywhere. It is very convenient. The sensor reporting that the scheduler gives you can monitor hundreds of jobs that could potentially be running in a given hour.

All the scheduled tasks are available in a dashboard or workflow view that different teams leverage. This is important and great. Having the ability to have a dashboard or workflow allows for easier troubleshooting. We also have alerting set up through email triggers, which are very helpful.

We leverage it for file transfer. We don't necessarily have application workflows dependent on those, but we do have Control-M for the migration of files. The visibility of a successful transfer is very useful, e.g., the ability to report on that or view whether that job succeeded or failed in the dashboard. You have an alert that would trigger on a failure. So, failure is automated. The Control-M job could retry that file migration a number of times based on logic that you have programmed into the job, and having to avoid manual intervention is useful.

The alerts are helpful and can contribute to faster issue resolution in the event of an issue.

View full review »
NP
Director at a performing arts with 5,001-10,000 employees

The most valuable feature for us is Managed File Transfer. We have a lot of file transfers in-house. Every FTP was being done by hand. Managed File Transfer is simply the best thing for us. This is the most used feature.

The credentials vault is really important. Before Control-M, every user's operator needed to know the username and password to access a system. With Control-M, we don't need to share passwords anymore. We write down the username and password one time, then we use it without knowing the password. 

The amount of integration that Control-M already has. We use the web services. We are using the SQL and Oracle integrations because we have a huge environment and a lot of applications in-house. Because we have integrations with all these tools, we don't need to give access to the operators. Now, we have everything in a single pane of glass. The operators can see all night what is happening, where, and if they need manual intervention.

One of our most used features is Control-M's library of plugins for orchestrating and monitoring work flows and data. We have a lot of different applications, plugins, and API automation, which are really important for us. We are migrating a tool from Apache, which is Java code. So, we can schedule the Java code with the API automation plugin that Control-M delivers for us. We are now starting to operate this way.

We use the Control-M Role-Based Administration feature. It is integrated with our Active Directory. We have groups in Active Directory, who are administrators and operators. Then, we map this role-base directly in Control-M. Role-Based Administration empowers us to decentralize product teams to manage their own application workflow orchestration environments with full autonomy. We divided this by environment: production, non-production, and demo environments. For each of these environments, we have different roles in Microsoft Active Directory. These roles are implemented by Control-M Role-Based Administration.

The use of Role-Based Administration eliminates the need to submit tickets or requests to the Control-M administrator. They don't open tickets and are autonomous when doing their job. From a security posture standpoint, it is important for us because we know that only the people who have credentials can access these environments, doing the job that they have to do.

We use Control-M Centralized Connection Profiles. We create the connections for the user and password. After that, we don't need to share passwords anymore, which is important for us.

View full review »
AH
IT Specialist TWS at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

What Control-M offers at TWS that IBM Workload Scheduler doesn't offer becomes available with the next rollout of the software.

It's one of the top options on the market today. It's one of the better enterprise solutions.

The initial setup is largely straightforward.

The solution is stable and reliable.

There are lots of features you can add to the solution if you would like to.

View full review »
JoseQuintero1 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Services Manager at a tech services company with self employed

Control-M is intuitive, and BMC has tutorials for every application to help you with the basics. Once you know what you're doing, everything falls into place. The graphical interface is drag and drop. There are plenty of objects to drag and drop inside. You need to study them, but once you know how it works, it's just dragging and dropping like you are playing with a Lego set. 

You drag two actions to the workspace and connect them to establish a relationship, schedules, and subtasks inside each one of them. It seems complex initially, but it becomes intuitive the longer you use it.

You can almost reach out intuitively into every nook and cranny of the entire UI. It's user-friendly for the initiate, but you could be lost if you've never used an orchestrator or an enterprise-grade software like Control-M. However, Control-M has built-in tutorials that help you with the first steps. The tutorial isn't comprehensive, but at least you will learn the first steps, so you can advance and learn more.

View full review »
CG
System Programmer at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

All of its features are very valuable. We have been working with Control-M for many years. For people who have been working with it, there is no other way. This product is a part of us.

It is very easy to use. Our operators are new people, and they start to work with Control-M from the first day in the bank.

In our bank, all new applications need to be implemented with Control-M. We try to look for the best way to establish communication between both products. One of the new features for us is Application Integrator. It is a very interesting feature because it lets us integrate with those applications that are not included in Control-M. By using Application Integrator, we can easily integrate new technologies. With the help of Application Integrator, we recently integrated with Blue Prism, which is a robotic product. We could integrate such processes into Control-M. Now, we are working with Ansible, and we are putting Ansible automated processes into Control-M.

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GR
Control-M Analyst at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

The whole Control-M scheduling package is valuable. 

The most important features are that it is easy to use and graphical, since I'm a graphical person. This allows me to see it on the screen. I've used other scheduling tools, and the information wasn't there. Being able to see the jobs that connect to another job is real important to me.

It can do anything that I need. We do real-time jobs. We also do jobs that have to run at certain times. I have not been presented with a scheduling need that I was not able to do. It is very flexible and dynamic.

I learned it intuitively, and it's easy to use. I speak to operators who sometimes have limited technical knowledge and they are able to pick it up with my help. They're able to pick it up pretty easily and do the functions that they need to do. 

View full review »
ZW
Operator /Assistant Scheduler at Engen

It is more about the notification tools and its ability interface with SAP. It has the ability to notify people about jobs and schedule based on prerequisites, because this is not something that we can actually do within SAP. For example, if one job is dependent on another job completing, SAP doesn't have this capability. This is why we went with Control-M. 

It is very simple to use. I have only been in this position for four years, but it was really easy for me to pick up and monitor Control-M.

In the client, it provides a unified view for me. I can alter the view that I want to see jobs and conditions. This is nice to have. The fact that you can see everything in one space is very important, especially these days where everything is about data and monitoring as well as because we are working from home on a global basis. So, in real-time, I can monitor jobs, failures, or anything that might be stuck. The real-time monitoring and the ability to see everything in one place is important for us because we operate 24/7.

I use the mobile and web interface. I started off with the desktop client, and there are some slight differences in the interface between the mobile, web interface, and desktop client. This is a nice feature, because when I am on the road or going for a walk, then I have my mobile with me and I can get notifications if I need to run anything. Then, I can just log on from there.

All the modules within Control-M can interface with SAP.

View full review »
DG
Administrator at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

The most valuable feature is the reporting function. It allows us to pull up reports for specific information that the end-users are looking for.

The planning and monitoring features in Control-M 20 help us because we can forecast to assist with network maintenance. For example, if we have something major going on with the network and there is going to be downtime, we can do a forecast to see what's going to be running at that particular time and adjust things accordingly.

View full review »
DW
Operations Manager at L Brands, Inc.
  • Maintaining and monitoring of workloads have been and continue to be the most valuable feature in our environment. 
  • There is a batch monitoring tool called Batch Impact Manager, which proactively warns when processing is behind and SLAs are in jeopardy of being missed. 
  • Their forecasting tool is very handy. 
  • They also have an API interface, although I cannot speak to it as we have not amassed enough experience to provide a fair assessment.
View full review »
VJ
Systems Engineer - Senior Control M Admin at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

The features most valuable differ from client to client. One of our clients used Control-M to execute multiple scripts in distributed systems and mainframe environments, which in turn ensured proper functioning of equipment, updating data, BI report, etc. over their multiple stores and distribution centre. Another client I worked with required mainly files to be transferred to third parties/vendors/internal businesses.

In all cases, Control-M was able to deliver it flawlessly, and also with add-on security features such as SSH connections and PGP encryption.

View full review »
RS
Senior Engineer - IT Infrastructure at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

The scheduling feature and scheduling tool are the most valuable features. I like the scheduling services that we have in Control-M, which are very beneficial to our organization because they are automating things. There is also less manual work. We can schedule a task without any manual interruptions.

We use the File Transfer feature from BMC. Before File Transfer, we used to have to develop the script, which was always a problem for us. After using File Transfer from BMC, a lot of our issues were resolved. Also, it is ready to use. There are many extra, additional features, which help our day-to-day work requirements. File Transfer is a fantastic feature of BMC.

The web version is quite new. When compared to the client version, the web version has made a lot of improvements that needed to be done.

Because of the Role-Based Administration feature, we have been able to give autonomy to our users to develop their cycles how they want. Using this Role-Based Administration feature, we are able to give restricted access based on their job roles. 

View full review »
SP
Lead Consultant at a media company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The main reason we came to Control-M was to integrate everything together and have it all in a single platform. We use different applications, and integrating them was not possible previously. With Control-M it is. Apart from integration, the main features are for long-running jobs and SLA alerts. But there is definitely a lot to explore and to work on within Control-M.

The solution provides us with a unified view where we can easily define, orchestrate, and monitor all application workflows and data pipelines. We have a team called pro-mon and they monitor all the jobs for us. A single view makes it easy for them to monitor things. Control-M comes with a documentation section for each job. As an SME, I put in the high-level steps in the job documentation; what to do if a job fails. They can read it and do level-one support. Some jobs are very critical and require an immediate call, but with other jobs they can wait, re-run, or read the documentation to give them some guidance. That really helps all our teams. That single view for the monitoring team, where they can see things in a single application, is important because the business needs all jobs completed within their SLAs. Indirectly, it's helping the business to get its data on time.

Another reason we use Control-M is to integrate file transfers within our application workflows. We have cross-business functionalities, where one business generates something and another business wants to use those files. We use a lot of MFT and AFT functionalities. As a result, Control-M has definitely improved our timelines and SLAs. We have an easy-to-monitor solution now. Before Control-M, each application team had to monitor its own jobs. Sometimes they would miss something and they wouldn't know that there is a mistake in a job. But once Control-M came into the picture and we had a dedicated team to monitor everything, we were able to provide timely files to the business. The business is very appreciative of the improvements after implementing Control-M. It has improved things a lot when it comes to providing files to the business on time.

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PW
VP Control-M Scheduling at Northern Trust

Monitoring is a valuable aspect of it. The monitoring tool is very good. It's very easy for expert and entry-level users to use on short notice. Also, the usability is good.

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it_user505632 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Consultant at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Control-M has a huge number of features, including:

  • Cross-platform support
  • Integration with applications such as Oracle, SAP, FTP, Hadoop, JMS, and many others.
  • A GUI with various filter options that allows you to manage jobs from one screen.
  • Add-ons such as BIM, Reporting Facility, and Forecast.
  • Automated error handling allows you to define actions to be taken depending on the exit status of a job.
  • Web-based and mobile applications allow you to manage Control-M from anywhere.
View full review »
RG
Batch Scheduling Administrator at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

The best part about this product is that it has a lot of features. Control-M doesn't limit us and we can use it for a lot of things.

Control-M is easy to install, use, and maintain. It is easier to work with than other products.

The web interface hosts a lot of videos and webinars and I really appreciate this because I find them very helpful. They have tutorials that explain how to approach the new technologies and explain how things can be done using Control-M. This is something that I use a lot.

The Application Integrator is helpful because not all applications have a module available in Control-M, and we can use this feature to create them.

View full review »
RS
Sr. Automation Engineer at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The most valuable feature is the Automation API - Jobs as Code. This is the future of workload automation. It brings Control-M into the DevOps sphere, and they are focusing a lot of effort with monthly releases of this product.

View full review »
BB
Application Automation Deveoper at iPSL

Integration capabilities, plugins, support communities, visibility, MFT, Reports, APIs. As mentioned earlier, all these features mean that we don't need to use multiple solutions to do the task. It also makes things a lot easier that way.

MFT changed the way we manage our file transfers. On top of that, all of it is directly visible in the same GUI. All the statistics can be viewed at the click of a button. Although a bit flaky sometimes, it is very helpful.

Experts in the communities need a special mention here. There's a huge number of people who spend their valuable time helping each other, solving others problems. Although the actual BMC support can be slow in response sometimes, the expertise & the helpful nature of people in the BMC Community for Control-M more than make up for it.

View full review »
LF
Manager Digital Solutions at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees

It creates an audit trail for jobs that we run off of it.

With opportunity to run things through a repository, such as a scheduler, you have a better opportunity to ensure the information is where it needs to be when it needs to be there.

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it_user675882 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Support at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

Promotions between environments, as well as local, mass update, versioning, and self-service.

View full review »
AR
Production Engineer at Alphaserve Technologies®

The feature we use most in Control-M is related to the file transfer module. It is quite advanced compared to other tools like Automate, etc. The new version which has come of same MFT has a lot of advanced features which makes it very easy to work with. There is less need for written programs and more GUI-based stuff.

View full review »
it_user682857 - PeerSpot reviewer
Control-M Workload Admin at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

Product is intuitive, you can start working with it and figure out the basics pretty quickly. The built in modules (examples: File Transfer, Database, File Watcher etc.) help eliminate custom built scripts which accomplish the same thing.

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it_user512079 - PeerSpot reviewer
Application Development Analyst at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

Scheduling of the workflows: We had to run a few thousand scripts on a daily, weekly, monthly, semiannual, and annual basis. Without this tool, scheduling would have been really difficult. This tool also helps in documenting the runs, which would further enable us to check for defects.

View full review »
RR
Manager at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees
  1. File transfer.
  2. It has an easy configuration. 
  3. You don't need to create individual scripts for individual file transfer jobs. This reduces the load on the individual servers, when compared to a local task scheduler running on any OS.
  4. The frequency at which it runs; it can be scheduled to run every minute. It is quite fast and quickly completes the job.
  5. The online dashboard and job status. 
  6. It has an alert mechanism for any failures.

These items are more useful when compared to the traditional way of doing or scheduling things.

It is on the web. This provides ease of administration, where we can manage the service from a central location. Also, can check or view all the jobs on a single dashboard, where we can manage and monitor them. 

View full review »
EB
Data Center Operations Supervisor at a non-tech company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Automation is its most valuable feature. It comes down to if you schedule a job, then it runs on its own. You don't need to have an operator manually start a script, start a mainframe job, etc.

I love the usability. It works. 

If a job fails, that development team is notified right away, which improves reliability. Previously, it was on the operators to notify the developers that their job failed, erred, or aborted. Now, it's all automated.

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it_user682359 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Technical Consultant at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Self Service, BIM features are most valuable. As no need to login to EM client and check the job status. From any where we can login to self service poral and validate the process status. Different Control modules.

View full review »
ZS
AWS Certified Solution Architect at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees

The scheduling and management were really good. Monitoring was also better. It had a good visual presentation. It showed me charts and all such things. It was really good on that side.

It provided a unified view to easily define, orchestrate, and monitor all of our application workflows and data pipelines. We didn't have to go inside the box to find out what was happening behind the scenes. All that was easily showing up on the UI, which was a good part of it.

We used it for data transfer within our application workflows. It was very fast and secured.

View full review »
HB
IT Operations Specialist with 1,001-5,000 employees

We use Control-M’s Role-Based Administration feature. it empowers decentralized product teams to manage their own application workflow orchestration environments with full autonomy. This feature is mostly under the compliance team. The feature is important, because without it, the day-to-day operations of the bank would not run. It is managing all our on-premises jobs, like application cleanups. We are doing everything via Control-M.

The use of Role-Based Administration definitely eliminates the need to submit tickets or requests to the Control-M administrator. The integration part of the Role-Based Administration has become very easy for us. We can integrate directly with Active Directory. This makes it easier for us to do things.

The MFT jobs are a valuable feature for us.

Control-M provides us with a unified view, where we can easily define, orchestrate, and monitor all our application workflows and data pipelines. It centralizes things and does automatic job scheduling.

We use Control-M to integrate file transfers within our application workflows. Nowadays, we depend on this feature for all our applications file transfers. This feature is helpful when you need to manage complicated documents or other files.

View full review »
FS
Presales- BMC Software at TechAccess

It has multiple features. You can plan your execution in Control-M. It provides one single window where you can define workflows regardless of geographic boundaries and platforms. A batch process can be executed from this single window.

It provides insights into your processes. Your business people will know what process they are running and what is the state of the process. Instead of knowing that they're not going to meet the SLA the next morning, the business people immediately know the changes in their process.

Control-M is very easy. I can tell a non-technical person that this is how it works, and he would be able to easily understand it. Business people can understand the methodology of Control-M and the intuitive features that it has. It has a fantastic graphical user interface and is easy to understand. You just have to drag and drop but in a very intuitive way.

Monitoring features are also good. It has different color coding schemes, which can help you to understand the status of your workflow. An operator who is not that technical and is just monitoring the status of the application can see by color-coding the status of a process. If anything goes wrong or a process is stuck, it gives you a hint. You can just right-click and see the logs and the output. Even if the system is not right there in the data center and is located somewhere else, you can monitor it right from there and see the workflows.

View full review »
KP
Control-M Tech Lead at iPSL

The most valuable feature is the Autoedit variable resolution in planning. This feature allows developers to better understand the schedule, and allow them to correct any potential issues in advance.

The MFT dashboard is also a useful tool to track all file transfers. It provides detailed information about both source and destination.

View full review »
it_user520743 - PeerSpot reviewer
Middleware Analyst at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • The ability to view a history of jobs\tasks that have run: This makes troubleshooting a breeze.
  • The ability to proactively forecast the runtime of a workflow: Managing SLA expectations and proactively generate alerts when the SLA won’t be met.
  • Having a flow diagram of all workflows and the relationship between jobs\tasks: This is a visual representation of the entire workflow estate, which is updated in real time.
  • Control modules: These are add-ons that further integrate Control-M with other third-party products, eliminating the need to write any custom code. E.g., Control-M For File Transfers makes it effortless to SFTP files externally or within the organization.
  • Mass update: This feature allows for multiple fields of job definitions to be updated based on certain search criteria, with a very user-friendly interface.
View full review »
it_user506682 - PeerSpot reviewer
Operational Manager at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

There are many valuable features, including its ability to interface with so many applications and allowing complex scheduling to be done easily.

BMC provides control modules that interface with third-party applications such as SAP, DB, VMware, FileWatcher, AFT and many more. These are valuable features that allow jobs with those applications to be easily scheduled.

View full review »
CM
System Admin and Architect at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Monitoring is a valuable aspect of it. The monitoring tool is very good, and it is easy for expert and entry level users to use on a short notice.

View full review »
it_user540414 - PeerSpot reviewer
Master Scheduler at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

There are no specific features that I could say are more valuable than others. The whole product is valuable to us.

View full review »
MS
Production Support Manager at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Job processing and flows are great. Report functionality on all batch processes using Crystal Reports is excellent. The escalation process on jobs is awesome and that goes for the various modules and their functionality.

View full review »
GR
Sr Operations Analyst at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The most valuable features are 

  • the managing of file transfers
  • the product keeping up with technology.

It's also very user-friendly and easy to manage job flow.

View full review »
it_user518730 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Consultant at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees

With version 9, there is out-of-the-box automatic failover (high availability), as well as the new agent deployment tool.

Automatic failover allows for active-passive high availability. If the Control-M Application were to fail on one server, it would automatically start up and continue processing on the backup (failover) server.

The agent deployment tool allows for upgrading or patching agents directly from the configuration manager (CCM) instead of logging into each agent one by one. A big time saver.

View full review »
RD
Actimize Implementor and Developer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

The Control-M feature I find the most valuable is the ability to configure a lot compared to a contract. 

View full review »
CM
Pre-Sales Engineer, Solution Architect, Technical Area Coordinator at a consultancy with 11-50 employees

Its compatibility with the new technologies and platforms, like the Google Cloud or Amazon, is the most valuable. Its console allows us to view the duration and execution of a process. It is also very easy to use and easy to implement.

View full review »
SD
IT Manager at a consumer goods company with 201-500 employees

I find it very helpful to be able to keep track of all our help desk tickets.

View full review »
JH
Team Lead at a transportation company with 5,001-10,000 employees

We value Control-M mainly for the ability to control multiple nodes in a coordinated manner. Control-M has the ability to really coordinate across a lot of nodes. That's the most valuable thing. 

Control-M is a mature tool with many features. It's pretty stable and very easy to learn. You can become an expert in it within a short time.

View full review »
it_user676749 - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Workload Manager.

View full review »
it_user499695 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Technical Consultant at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

Control-M Virtual Terminal (CTMVT) for AS400: Because most of my customers are in banking, where their core banking processes run on AS400, Control-M Virtual Terminal helps us automate the interactive process on AS400.

View full review »
SL
Technical Director at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

It is capable of service orchestration, which is needed by my organization.

It provides us with a unified view, where we can easily define, orchestrate, and monitor all our application workflows and data pipelines. This is very important for scheduling my organization's batch jobs.

The error content of Control-M is clearly displayed.

View full review »
JP
E-Business Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • The ability to go from one system to another.
  • To be able to trigger something off of it, yet we are still on a mainframe for our batch processing. 
  • To be able to trigger something from the batch, then distribute that back and forth.
  • The solution has always been very streamlined. 
  • Ease of use
  • The BMC customer service behind the tool has been most valuable.
View full review »
it_user697383 - PeerSpot reviewer
Workload Automation Wizard at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Self Service for repeatable, low impact workload automation processes. BIM for SLA management. GUI client for visibility into the enterprise schedule. New to v9, the automatic Agent upgrade features have been quite helpful too. Relatively easy to perform upgrades and fix packs.

View full review »
it_user676545 - PeerSpot reviewer
Works at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

The entire suite of Control-M is valuable.

View full review »
it_user515760 - PeerSpot reviewer
Control-M Developer at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

Control-M has a huge number of features and utilities that assist users in monitoring their schedules, and developers to build schedules that interface with many technologies. Here are some that stand out:

  • Cross-platform support. A Linux job can be dependent on a Windows job, which can be dependent on many other flavours of hardware/software. Your batch is therefore managed by a single tool, allowing you to monitor your entire flow.
  • Great GUI. Easy to navigate. Customisable. Status at a glance.
  • BIM (Batch Impact Manager). Proactively monitors a batch flow, against a pre-defined OLA/SLA and alerts as soon as an exception occurs that might threaten the target.
  • Automated error handling. Depending on the exit status of a process, automated actions can be defined that might circumvent the need to callout.
  • Forecast utility. Particularly useful after making changes to a batch flow, to see what impact those changes will have.
  • Reporting utility. Generate reports for the business to track batch performance, usage, and so on.
  • Mobile App. Business users can track the progress of their own batch flow, on the go.
  • Control Modules. These allow you to define jobs that interface with databases, SFTP, SAP, and so on, directly, via secure connection profiles.
  • Too many great features to list!
View full review »
CM
Pre-Sales Engineer, Solution Architect, Technical Area Coordinator at a consultancy with 11-50 employees
  • The dependencies between multi-platform processes are very good.
  • The capabilities of the solution are great.
  • It offers very good reporting.
  • The product offers very good integration with other solutions.
  • The implementation and adoption are easy.
View full review »
JL
Software Consultant at a consultancy with 11-50 employees

It is very easy to use. The HA feature is also very good.

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it_user896988 - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of IT Procurement at a renewables & environment company with 5,001-10,000 employees

You can let users access the system and manage jobs: self-service.

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it_user688137 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Technologist at a energy/utilities company with 5,001-10,000 employees

The user interface is very easy to navigate.

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it_user118770 - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Service Management Architect at a tech consulting company with 1,001-5,000 employees

High availability through software, supported by an Oracle RAC with ASM, is a valuable feature. In operation, it is fantastic.

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it_user512901 - PeerSpot reviewer
Control-M Analyst at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The GUI interface is exceptional, beating any of the competitors’ products I have used. Also, the range of job types and integration with other products such as Hadoop, SAS, databases, etc. is very useful.

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it_user676302 - PeerSpot reviewer
Produktionssteuerung at a wellness & fitness company with 10,001+ employees
  • Job scheduling in general
  • Self-service
  • Workload archiving
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it_user512913 - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
  • AFT
  • Job scheduling with various platforms
  • Blending options for module compatibility

Although I work with various modules for Control-M, i.e., SAP, Informatica, DB, OS, and Windows. We can't do AFT with either Windows scheduler nor with Linux cron jobs. Control-M is the center for all of the applications, where it acts as the mediator between the application and the servers. Not only is it secure, but there are various major applications we can work on.

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it_user500652 - PeerSpot reviewer
Production Control Analyst with 501-1,000 employees
  • The GUI interface with the ability to oversee the whole enterprise in a graphical way
  • The ability to create filters for applications and groups
  • The ability to zoom in and out within applications or the whole enterprise

These make automation and scheduling troubleshooting easier.

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AG
Manager Data Architecture Services at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
  • There is a wide range of connectors. 
  • Ability to handle files remotely through the advanced file transfer feature.
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it_user687186 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Support at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

I think the administration part is much more valuable than any other feature. I don’t really remember the commands though, but working on the server is better than the GUI.

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it_user675912 - PeerSpot reviewer
Operations Specialist at a hospitality company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The GUI for operators.

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it_user538239 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior IT Specialist at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • User friendly interface
  • Self-service portal
  • Support for AS400 and mainframes
  • many more.

Not all central scheduler tools have agents for iSeries, z/OS and UNISYS 2000. These are valuable features because I don't have to use many tools and I have one central tool for all platforms.

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it_user63360 - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal, IT Data Research and Mining Analyst at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The automation of the batch jobs.

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it_user783723 - PeerSpot reviewer
Database Security Specialist at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

The flexibility to schedule the jobs on various OS level platforms. It works on agent-level architecture, hence the usability is enhanced. 

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it_user709788 - PeerSpot reviewer
Production Engineer at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

The deployment agent in this version was the most attractive thing I have found -- it's fast and very useful to upgrade in one go.

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it_user705060 - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant, Production Control Services at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Control-M has a huge number of features and utilities that assist users in monitoring their schedules and developers to build schedules which interface with many technologies. Here are some that stand out:

  • Cross-platform support: A Linux job can be dependent on a Windows job, which can be dependent on many other flavours of hardware/software. Your batch is therefore managed by a single tool, allowing you to monitor your entire flow.
  • Great GUI: Easy to navigate. Customisable. Status at a glance.
  • Automated error handling: Depending on the exit status of a process, automated actions can be defined that might circumvent the need to callout.
  • Forecast utility: Particularly useful after making changes to a batch flow, to see what impact those changes will have.
  • Reporting utility: Generate reports for the business to track batch performance, usage, and so on.
  • Mobile App: Business users can track the progress of their own batch flow, on the go.
  • Control Modules: These allow you to define jobs that interface with databases, SFTP, SAP, and so on, directly, via secure connection profiles.
  • Too many great features to list; excellent product..
View full review »
it_user505659 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr System Analyst at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
it_user500040 - PeerSpot reviewer
Integration Consultant at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
  • No product downtime
  • Easy to administrate and use
  • A lot of integration tools and control modules

We use the BPI (Java and web services) DB integrator, AFT file transfer, CM for Informatica Control-M modules that easily integrated the non-basic batch jobs with the regular batch jobs. There was no need to script file transfer or SQL query jobs; all of that comes straight from the BMC Control-M box.

View full review »
PR
Automation Specialist at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

Most valuable feature would be the ability to detect and notify when a process has not completed successfully.

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it_user505689 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Lead at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

The GUI is very user friendly and also plugins (Control Modules) are available for almost all of the widely used applications.

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it_user540252 - PeerSpot reviewer
App Support Sr. Analyst at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Linking of jobs (visual, which other products don't have): It will give you a whole picture as to how other jobs are linked to each other (or if there's no link to other jobs).

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it_user535422 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Consultant at a tech consulting company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Integration with different modules such as:
Web Service -WS
Advanced File Transfer - AFT

View full review »
SM
Technical Consultant at Atgen Software Solutions LLP

This product has an excellent GUI that is user friendly and provides job management.

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SS
Software Engineer at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

The most valuable features are the: 

  • GUI console
  • Stability
  • Workflow
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it_user791985 - PeerSpot reviewer
Operations Manager at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
  • Cross platform scheduling
  • Built-in file transfer
  • Batch impact management
  • Self-service 

They are all such valuable tools. Though, the ability to dynamically predict batch run time is so valuable. 

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it_user790782 - PeerSpot reviewer
Co-fundador with 1-10 employees

Unlike the batch controls of other solutions, BMC includes a graphical user interface (GUI). It is comprehensive and a little daunting, but there are many options you can pick.

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Buyer's Guide
Control-M
April 2024
Learn what your peers think about Control-M. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: April 2024.
767,847 professionals have used our research since 2012.