Control-M Reviews

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.

It has made execution of workflows simple, especially batch runs.

We had to migrate from an E2 to an E3 framework, where we manually had to change the name of more than 1,000 instances in a batch. This could have been easy if it was automated, such as searching for a keyword and replacing it with the desired name. In BMC Control-M, this facility is only available for the file path and connection.

I have used it for two years.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is 7/10. I faced an issue in which the connection was lost in the middle of a run. It was a small batch, so I managed it by rerunning it. I contacted tech support on a weekend, because I had to run a weekly batch. I didn’t see much of an immediate response from them, but they were able to sort out the issue a little later.

I have used this since I joined my current company.

Initial setup was straightforward.

It is worth the price.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options.

It is definitely a good tool in the business intelligence domain, which can be used for small or big batch runs.

Control-M is used for file transfer and batch job scheduling.

Control-M provides a unified view where we can easily define, orchestrate, and monitor all application workflows and data pipelines. This is important because while running a robust environment, and managing and scheduling on individual servers are quite tedious. It has a centralized mechanism where it can schedule jobs on individual components within the environment. In this way, it helps with the ease of administration and achieving business requirements.

Control-M is used to integrate file transfers within the application workflows. Generally speaking, it has helped the business service delivery. For all applications, it has helped to notice bottlenecks, using its dashboard monitoring and alert mechanism. Therefore, immediate action can be taken in the case of failures. When compared to the traditional module or way of operating and scheduling, where the centralized monitoring alert mechanism is not available, Control-M helps in achieve having the application workflow run smoothly.

Control-M is useful to automate all critical and non-critical processes. Using Control-M, we can automate application workflows as well as file transfers involved in application workflows. We can also use it to run batches related to applications. Automating these processes reduces the RTO and RPO, which helps in the case of failures. It also helps to identify bottlenecks and take corrective measures.

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. 

In these three areas, I would like to see improvements in Control-M:

1. It is not giving us diagnostic logs during job runs. 
2. I would like them to beautify the dashboards, in terms of the number of jobs processed which have failed or are in progress. 
3. Control-M doesn't have any dynamic reporting facilities or features. 

I have been using it for about 1 year

If you implement Control-M, and configure it properly, it is quite stable. In the last year, BMC has been releasing a number of patches or updates to make it more stable. 

Initially, stability was not good. When BMC released quite a number of updates to fix some bugs, it became stable.

For any environment with about 80,000 of the jobs running per day, at least we require 10 people to monitor it and three people to administer it.

It is feasible to scale. We have not found any hiccups.

For an environment with about 80,000 jobs running per day, it requires at least 10 people to monitor it and three people to administer it.

Centralized monitoring and administration can be achieved

BMC support will be good level with more number or expertise available

BMC support is clueless on the new issues that arise. It seems like 90% of them are escalated to the R&D department, where they research and come back with a solution.

The guides or materials available are quite useful when exploring all the features.

No solution was used Previously, most of them use the traditional way of going through scripts.

Initially, the setup was a bit complex when trying to understand what all the features and settings do. However, when we explored it more, then we understood it and became comfortable with it.

Initial deployment took a couple of weeks. But once explored more the more convenient

The implementation is always with Control-M. Look at how to utilize all the features in Control-M, work out how to use them in subsequent reports, or while designing subsequent dataflows.

Work with BMC support for upgrades and for any issues encountered.

Looking at the rate of the usage, I can definitely see there is a gain. It is definitely profitable for any organization.

Control-M will help improve data transfers by approximately 80%. As an example, if you run any file transfer schedule in the local OS schedulers, compared to Control-M file transfer, Control-M will be better than the traditional schedulers. This is because of the number of features Control-M has and the frequency at which it runs. You can also choose the type of transaction data during a file transfer, which can be helpful for scheduling and troubleshooting.

Depends on business requirement

No other options available

I definitely recommend Control-M. It is quite stable, scalable, and the ease of administration is good as well.

Useful to automate batch scheduling. integrate within applications

Can be streamlined in data analytics applicaitons with Control-M.

I would rate Control-M as an eight out of 10.

We use it for our job automation, running jobs daily, monthly, and annually. So, it is all automation.

We use another product, which is a BMC competitor, and we were able to integrate the two product. Therefore, if a job fails, it is automatically contacting the development team who is in charge of that job.

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.

The technical support is great. They get it back to you right away. As soon as you open up a ticket, they are on it. I am happy with them.

We had a BMC competing product, then we integrated it with Control-M.

The initial setup was complex, because I wasn't used to it.

We used a consultant for the deployment. We had a great experience with them.

We are not yet using the solution's application workflow orchestration.

We are not using it for business modernization initiatives yet. 

We don't use any other BMC products.

We're not fully entrenched in Control-M yet.

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.

5 years back, our organisation runs Control-M 6.2. After upgrading to ver 7, application team benefited with the new features and very to easy manage their application jobs. Productivity has increased, introduced Job naming standards, stream line the application based on the priority.. etc...,

All is well in Control-M tool . Thank you for new enhancements of tool . But for some issues, BMC will suggest to upgrade to new version which will not be feasible to standards of the organisation. Hence some work around should be shown to run the business until new version was upgraded.

I am working on Control-M tool from past 10 years in different organisations.

No, its very pretty simple to deployment and configure all the components.

No issues with stability. Its easy to switch PROD to DR and vise versa, if there are any issues.

No

10 out of 9.

10 out of 0

N/A

It's straightforward to use Control-M compare to other tools. Easy to migrate from other tools to Control-M.

Up-gradation from ver 6.2 to ver 7 was done in-house.

As technical personal. I am not able to answer this question.

Compare to other tools Pricing and licensing was more. It should be decrease.

In my previous organisation, I have refer Control-M for batch process. But due to pricing client has not agrees and then client has decided to go with Active Batch tool.

No.. Happy to work on Control-M and looking to upgrade current version Control-M ver 7 to 9. One suggestion after a stable version released there should be gap of 2 year of support.

We're not using it currently. We just did a PoC on it. We developed two or three use cases, and based on that, I had implemented the PoC.

For our use case, we wanted to schedule a job that will get data from the auditor and put it into Mongo. For that, we needed to do some calculations, and there was a whole workflow behind it.

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.

Its cost should be improved. It is more expensive than other solutions.

Its architecture is old. AutoSys gives more flexibility.

I just started learning it. I saw the demo and started playing around with it.

It has old architecture, so it is sustainable.

Its scalability is fast.

I didn't use their technical support. 

Currently, we have a manual process. We don't have an automated process.

Its setup was straightforward. It was easy for us to host it up because it is a service, and we just hosted it up in the cloud, and it was there.

Its deployment was very fast. It took less than a day. I had to run some commands. I went through the documentation on BMC's website, and it was good.

Its cost is a little bit higher than other solutions such as AutoSys or DAC. For the demo, there were some plans, such as a start plan, scale plan, etc. Pricing was based on the plan.

We are also evaluating AutoSys and DAC. We have used Control-M only for PoC. We haven't decided whether we are going ahead with it or not. Its pricing is high, and its architecture is old. For our use cases, the architecture was a little bit older as compared to others. AutoSys gives more flexibility. 

Control-M's streamlining of our data and analytics projects didn't affect the rate at which we received actionable insights. The rate was okay, and I didn't see a drastic data speed change, but it was reliable.

I used its centralized connection profiles feature that enables you to store all connection profiles in a central database, but it was not really important for me. We already had a custom profile or custom configuration in our services for handling the connection. We were already doing that on our end. If we were not doing that on our end, the use of centralized connection profiles would be helpful for lowering the total cost of ownership.

I would rate Control-M a six out of 10. We only used it for PoC. We have not decided anything yet.

We are using Control-M for workload automation modules for day-to-day operations. We can click for visibility. After getting the information, we can minimize the workload, e.g., if I'm not available today, then I can automate the rescheduling for my operations. If some issues happen, like troubleshooting problems, Control-M identifies the exact error. So, it helps me quickly get into that area and troubleshoot the part.

With this version, we migrated from AFT to MFT jobs to help with SFTP connections. Before this version, AFT modeling was there. But, to utilize it, we would have to use a third-party system or software. When I moved to MFT modules, I didn't need third-party stuff so I could easily get clearance from the compliance team.

We are using the web-based version where we give individual users individual accounts.

We are using Control-M for day-to-day operations only. It is helpful for us in our day-to-day operations. It is a key in our financial sector. We are automating via Control-M in our treasury operations, including any evening updates. Control-M makes things easier and faster by helping our treasury operations go without any interruptions.

50% to 60% of our jobs are automated, like the scheduling part, and don't need manual intervention. The operator will monitor our jobs from that. This also minimizes manpower for updates, and we have already seen improvements in our manpower.

We have automated critical processes with Control-M, like SWIFT, which is a worldwide transfer application. We also use it for everyday backups. 

Control-M helps us achieve faster issue resolution. It lets us see the exact issue by providing error details. For example, one of our applications got stuck recently. We didn't know why it was stuck. When we went to Control-M, it said, "The Java memory is full." When the operator sees this issue, they can immediately call the system administrator to kill the process. This reduces time to resolution because it avoids escalation and contacting people unnecessarily.

If we make drastic changes to the environment, then we can see these changes end-to-end in Control-M. 

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.

We have been using this product for more than seven years.

I haven't seen any issues as of now.

One or two guys are enough for each shift. Daily, there are three or four guys who maintain it.

Scalability depends on the cost. Expanding can be very costly.

Whenever new things come in, we request them to be moved to this solution.

We only use our partner's support.

The initial setup is straightforward. It is relatively easy to upgrade the tool.

We moved everything, including the database. Now, it is the heart of our operations.

We have a partner company. However, we are managing it 90% of the time. 

Our experience with the partner company has been very good. They are very experienced with the solution.

The cost of the hardware is high. Because you need to license each job, it is costly.

We use other tools to streamline our data and analytics projects.

For the past two year, we have blocked mobile access per our cybersecurity guidelines.

I would rate this solution as eight out of 10.

My client is one of the largest banks in Pakistan. They are using it for their international branches as well as for branches all over Pakistan. They have around 16 or 17 international branches in Gulf, North America, South Africa, Seychelles, and Singapore.

The operation window of our client is 24 hours. At different locations, they have to perform different activities. If you are working in a banking environment, the main activity is at the close of business, which is monitored by Control-M for all of their branches. Instead of having 20 people, now they have three to four people who are monitoring the tasks. Control-M is taking care of the close-of-business monitoring tasks, such as backups, etc.

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.

A Control-M on-prem license is based on the number of jobs, which is the number of tasks a particular customer wants to have. These tasks have to be run within 24 hours window. For example, if you have a license for 100 jobs, you can run a maximum of 100 jobs in a 24-hour window. If your operations could not run 10 jobs, and they ran only 90 jobs, they just carry over to the next day, but the next day, they will have 110 jobs. Control-M asks you to buy those 10 more licenses because you were out of compliance in terms of the number of licenses. This is something that needs to be indicated in Control-M GUI so that customers know the number of licenses they're going to use in this time window. 

Their support and documentation should be improved. I am not that satisfied with their customer support. Sometimes, they don't have the answers. Their documentation is very poor. It is not well written, and it is not in a very logical manner.

You can use it on Unix, Linux, Windows, and AIX, but it needs some improvement on iSeries. It needs a built-in mechanism inside the system to give you an option to restore from the last point of failure. If a process crashes, the Control-M needs to have a mechanism in iSeries where the process can be restored from the last point of failure.

I have been using this solution for more than three years.

It is stable.

It is scalable. Its licensing is not based on the number of users. Its licensing is based on the number of tasks that you're using. You can have as many as 100 users, but in the environments that I have seen, there were between 10 to 20 users. You have administrators who can design the workflows, and you have operators who just monitor the results.

I am not that satisfied with their customer support. I would give them a 4 or 3.8 out of 5. Sometimes, they don't have the answers. 

Their documentation is not that clear. It is not well written, and it is not in a very logical manner. They just put information in the documentation, and you have to find things. It is not easy. If you are new to this product, you have to spend some time to understand what is it, and when you go to the documentation, most of the pages have a few lines, and then they ask, "Did it help?" It actually doesn't help. There is not much documentation, and it is not that clear. IBM products have very clear-cut, systematic, and guided activity sort of things on the website, whereas BMC's documentation is very poor. It is not that eloquent and clear.

It has some complexities because it is a complex environment. It has a three-tier environment on-prem, and one has to establish a secure connection between these entities, which is not easy. The first one is the master server console. The second one is the main engine that determines the scheduling process, and the third one is the agent. Agents have to be deployed on different client machines.

I would highly recommend this product. Its setup is complex, but once the setup is done, it hides away all the complexity. The end-user will have a very clear and intuitive interface to define the workflows. It is very easy to use.

I would rate Control-M an eight out of ten.

We use this solution to automate batch processing, create automated workflows to support various applications, and integrate various endpoints in the workflow to support business processes.

File transfer between our company and partner is critical for us. MFT has provided this solution and we are now using MFT for internal and external file transfers.

With version 9.0.18, which included new features, it has increased the usage of Control-M.

Introduction of Control-M-managed file transfer has increased usage in our organization. BIM is a good tool to monitor SLAs, and being a financial organization, this is a very good feature for us.

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.

Control-M MFT and Control-M API both need improvement.

The Control-M MFT has to support checksums for FTP transfer between our own Control-M agents.

The Control-M API does not support SQL database-type jobs, where a job has been configured to use the SQL catalog to locate SSIS.

BIM needs further improvement to include any dynamic-type jobs with the workflow.

The support and bug fix timeline need improvement.

Technical support for this solution needs to be improved.

We did not use another solution prior to this one.

We did not evaluate other options before choosing this solution.