Control-M Reviews

• 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.

It has given the organization visibility into how various applications relate to and depend on one another. It has reduced scripting and coding time down to almost zero with the out-of-the-box plugins.

There are many areas that have room for improvement in V7:

• Specific to Control-M for Files Transfer: Have a broader list or custom pre & post commands when running a file transfer.
• Customizable HTML shout emails, for a better user experience.
• Out-of-the-box New Day Process per table\application (This can be done with a custom user daily but requires a job to run at the specified “New Day Time”).
• Include some sort of label object (similar to a job, but only performs shouts and doesn’t have a cost), so you can categorize work flows.

Control-M V9 improves on most, if not all, of the pain points in V7.

In my professional career, I’ve been using Control-M for 12 years.

No issues experienced with stability at all.

I have not encountered any scalability issues. The way the product is tiered makes it easily scalable.

I find the level of technical support (Blue Turtle Technologies) to be exceptional. Whether it is a small query or a large problem, you will always get a timeous response and often one of the support staff members will be present on-site.

Control-M was here when I started at this organization, so I’m not sure if a different solution was previously used.

The initial setup was fairly simple. Once all the servers and DBs were set up, the installation of Control-M Enterprise Manager, Control-M Servers and Control-M Agents was painless.

Task-based licensing (number of active jobs) can get very expensive. Bundle multiple functions within a batch\script file.

I’ve tried and POCed many other workload automation\batch scheduling tools out there; none of them come close to functionality and ease-of-use as Control-M.

Decide on bulletproof naming standards\site standards. This will make implementation and promotion of workflows incredibly easy.

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.

We are able to automate a lot of scheduling, and integrate the scheduler with many applications to automate business cycles.

Cost

Provide a little customisation based on needs; the capability for development at the user level should be available. The reporting facility is a GUI with some standard queries. I think the portal needs to allow us to do reports that reflect many possibilities, like selecting fields present in the DB schema and building our own reports using the reporting GUI, rather than using any of the standard templates it offers.

Also, I’d like to be able to build a custom module for some applications that cannot be interfaced, provided we give some standard variables to connect with the application. For example, we are currently using the Axway product for file transfer on a very, very large scale. We are not happy with Axway, and would want to see if BMC can provide us a remedy for it. Or, if we were able to do some customization on the AFT module to incorporate this requirement.

I have used it for 10 years, starting with version 6.1.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

I rate technical support 10/10.

I did not previously use a different solution.

Initial setup was complex. We have integrated Control-M with many applications using some complex scripts for meeting our business needs.

Pricing and license cost is high.

Before choosing this product, we evaluated Redwood, Autosys, and $U (Dollar Universe).

If you are willing to pay for it, the product is excellent.

It automates operations for all parts of the company. There isn't a part of the company that doesn't have jobs scheduled for Control-M.

The amount of work that gets done. We execute probably up to a million jobs a day. With Control-M, there is visibility into it. There are notifications when things go wrong. I don't think our company could run without it.

I am sure it has improved application reliability and SLAs.

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.

The reporting tool still needs a lot of improvement. It was supposed to get better with the upgrade, and it really didn't get better. Its reporting aspects are poor, and management always wants to know things. It is sort of hard to get at tangible numbers without doing a lot of additional work outside of the system. It needs help, because it's such a useful thing to have. It needs to be more powerful and easier to use.  

Our users always want access to the database directly, so they can do their own queries and pull their own data. However, there really isn't a tool that we can give them that does what they want, and we don't give access to our production database. Although, in our new infrastructure, we are setting it up so we have a mirrored one where they can run queries, because there has been so much demand. Though, it would be nice if there was a tool within Control-M so people wouldn't be asking for this.

I don't want to have to reach out to a third-party application company to do automated notifications of any form. Right now, we still have people manually calling people and emailing people. They should have built-in integration for better notifications using an API, similar to what xMatters offers.

The stability varies a bit. There are bugs that we run across. There are some issues that we have. However, when you think about the amount of work that it does within the company, it runs a million things a day, and it pretty much works. I'm not up in the middle of the night every night with problems. Overall, it's very stable, but it's not immune to problems. Considering the amount of work that it does, the problems that it has are very small.

The last upgrade took us three years. Up until the current version that we are about to go into, you had to build out a whole new infrastructure, then extract data and put it back in place. Now, it's a huge improvement, as upgrades do not need to build out a whole new infrastructure. 

We are probably one of the largest users of Control-M due to the amount of work that it does for us, and we could have it doing more. We are currently upgrading it.

We haven't had any serious outages in quite a long time, even through the large growth that we have had. We've doubled the work in the last year and a half to two years, and it's handled it seamlessly. 

Most of the time, we don't get the answers that we are looking for from the technical support. That is why we use a consultant company.

Sometimes, it's very good, and sometimes not. We have mixed feelings. It used to be better.

Oracle Database backup teams used to do this all themselves via cron. Now, they have automated cron to Control-M for a lot of our database backups where they used to do this outside of Control-M. Other than that, I think everybody is using it.

The initial upgrade setup (for basic functionality) is not difficult.

I would like a simpler setup. We have had some challenges implementing, having to play with some different settings. In order to get it to do what was wanted of it, not alerting too often nor giving false alarms, it takes a bit of setup. Maybe something a little easier to use for setup would be nice.

We've been using a consultant, for the last two upgrades, which first came to us through BMC Professional Services. Now, we use them directly and are very happy with them. Because there is not enough internal staff at our company for Control-M to do day-to-day and upgrading, we bring in help.

It has to save us time. Instead of 800 applications internally doing their own thing, it centralizes everything into one location where notifications, etc., take the power of economies of scale into one central point of focus. So, it saves us money for us and our customers, whose jobs we are scheduling.

We have a five-year contract with task-based licensing.

We had another solution in-house because it came to us through an acquisition of some business. So, I dealt with a title scheduler for a couple of years. It was different. It was not as scalable, robust, and more difficult.

I would recommend it for the scalability and dependability. The software is constantly being improved and new add-ons are being created. It is a robust tool that's stable. It is well-supported, especially compared to a lot of other options out there.

We have had massive growth in the last year to two because of company acquisitions. We have added a lot of big data aspect processing and a lot of other processing. It has handled this quite well.

We are just starting to go into a bit of the DevOps, Workload Change Manager, and Helix Chatbox.

Even though we don't chose to use their wide scope of products, it is one of the things that is a real positive about BMC. They can handle everything a corporation could throw at it, which makes the experience of working with them a lot better.

We learn things everyday about the product and its available features. We work in an IT environment with inquisitive people. There are millions of options available, parameter-wise, within the system. I learn something new everyday by working around smart, intuitive people.

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

• Ninety percent or more of the batch processing is now centralized into a single scheduling platform. This helps the support teams so that they only need to go to one group for scheduling and monitoring the batch processing
• The operations support staff only has one platform where they can monitor almost all of our batch processing.

There aren’t any improvements that I’ve come across with the most recent release. If I had to note one improvement, it would be that jobs already in the system for a given day could be updated en masse. This could be the same on the database where the job definitions reside.

I have used the product for sixteen years.

I did not encounter any stability issues.

I did not encounter any scalability issues.

The level of support from BMC has been very good.

We already evaluated CA’s offering at the time because we were already using CA-7 on the mainframe.

Other than creating the jobs in Control-M once it was set up, I was not involved.

It is task based pricing. It is based on the number of jobs brought into the system daily and any that remain in the system from prior days.

For example, if you have 2000 new jobs that come in in for a new day, and you still have 500 left from previous days, you will need to have 2500 task licenses to cover them. This is the case, even if those 500 jobs are daily jobs that came in during the prior day and have not yet been completed.

We use BMC’s Control-M software for our open systems and SAP batch processing. We will be looking at converting the batch we are running via the solution to the same.

I’ve never used the mainframe version of Control-M before, so I don’t have any opinions about it.

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.

We have minimum downtime now. We have a bigger online window for our users to work. We now have a central dashboard to monitor the entire companies processes that is running.

V9 has now come out with some new features; it has just been launched, so I will have to review and see what's covered in the new release.

I have been using it for four years.

The support from the vendor is superb.

I have not encountered any stability issues. We run on a Unix platform, so no issues. On Windows, we had issues using MySQL instead of Postgres as recommended by the vendor.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

We receive excellent support from our service provider.

Technical support is excellent.

We previously used the IBM TWS solution. Control-M has much more functionality.

Setup was easy and there is a migration tool available for most platforms.

Pricing would be best to take the full suite and go with CPU licencing instead of TAS licencing.

Before choosing this product, we only evaluated Control-M.

It is the best in the market.

We use it to control job submission.

This product works with all the platforms that we use today. We're able to centralize our managing of job flows for all our platforms. That's how it really helps us.

It has also improved our SLAs.

In addition, it has definitely helped development. Now we have multiple developers running their jobs and it gives them a lot of flexibility.

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.

I would like to see the ease of upgrades improved, although they may have addressed that. We're still at an early version, but we plan to get to the latest and greatest very soon, where we can take advantage of easy upgrades.

Their technicians should be more involved when we're applying new technology to Control-M, such as cloud. We're working with cloud right now, with AWS, and getting the attention of a technician, sometimes, can take some time. It would be nice if they had somebody assigned to it. Dedicated support.

It's very stable. It's continuously running - we're a 24/7 shop. The only problem that may come up is applying it to new servers with new technologies. There can be little startup problems, but they're usually ironed out. Overall, the stability of the product is awesome.

It's very scalable. The product does technically work with any other hardware, using its agents, so it's very scalable.

Technical support is very good. They're very helpful. The only downside is getting their attention and fixing a problem in a timely fashion. But a lot of it is development. If it comes to an urgent problem, they usually respond fairly quickly. And I must say, there really haven't been that many urgent problems.

Upgrades are pretty straightforward. There's not really that much mystery to them.

We did use a consultant when we went to a new release from a very old release. But going forward, we're doing our own upgrades. Our experience with the consultant was very good. I forget which consultant we used, it was about eight years ago, but they were very good. They handled everything.

My advice would be to go ahead with Control-M. Get a lot of input from their technicians. Work with them. They're very good, and very helpful.

I've learned a lot because I came from the mainframe area, personally, where now I'm working with all this Windows and agent technology I never knew before.

We do not have Managed File Transfer yet, but we do want to get to it. We like what it offers, above advanced file transfer. We're looking forward to implementing that.

I'm going to give it an eight, only because I don't have anything else to compare it with.

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.

N/A – We are a consulting company that implements this application for clients.

I would like to see the Mainframe Control-M IN/OUT Condition feature of Relative ODAT added to the Distributed Control-M.

I have used it since 1996.

I have only encountered stability issues with the base installation; their product development team supplies fix packs for bugs.

I have not encountered any scalability issues; the product is scalable.

Technical support is 10 out of 10; support is available around the clock, 24/7.

N/A – We replace different solutions for clients usually due to high costs, lack of support or functionality of the legacy product.

Initial setup is quite easy; a wizard-based installation process.

I am on the technical services side and am not involved in pricing.

N/A – We only work with Control-M.

Do a proof of concept to see if it meets your needs.

Our primary use case for Control-M is to order the jobs we have, like database entries and processes that need to be run in Unix or any other environment. With Control-M, we can run a set of flows at a specific time, like maybe on the fourth of every month or every second Sunday of the month.

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

An issue we have run into in our lower environments is that Control-M can log you out frequently. This happens when you have a lot of applications running. Maybe it's just a configuration issue, but this is a pain point that would be good to look into. 

I have been using Control-M for a couple of years now. 

Control-M is a stable and reliable solution. 

I have not seen any issues with Control-M in our production environment. However, in the lower environment, we can see frequent log-outs. That could be an issue with how much they have allocated. 

In our organization, the development team uses it, as does the bank team. They monitor it. If a job fails, for example, Control-M sends out a notification and the team can take a look at what happened in the logs. They can do it on the fly instead of dealing with the issue later on. 

As soon as you have an issue, a ticket is created and the tech support is quite responsive. 

I did not set up Control-M in my organization, but the setup is straightforward. You just log in with your credentials and everything is already setup for you. You can access things in line with whatever authorization you have. 

I would recommend this solution because of the ease of use. To work with it, you do need to understand it and know how to configure it. But, once you do, you can take advantage of many features that are helpful.