Control-M Stability

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

Control-M is really stable. We have seen that throughout the years. I have had customers who have been running version 6.3 for seven years after support stopped. It has been running for three years straight, without a reboot or restart, doing its job. We have actually had issues with customers who don't want to upgrade. They have said, "This stuff is working perfectly. Just leave it alone because it just doesn't go down." 

We have a saying in our department as well. When somebody says there is a problem, we say, "It's not Control-M. Check everything else. Check the server, network, and database. It's not Control-M." 99 out of 100 times, we are right. It is either infrastructure or something else, but it is not Control-M.

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

I would rate its stability highly, compared to other tools in the market right now, such as UC4, and AutoSys. In the past, I have worked with many banks. All these financial companies are using Control-M, and there is a reason: It's due to the stability.

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

Since it supports business, it has to be stable. It's very stable. We have not had major outages or anything. That's always a good thing, however, like with any solution, its stability is going to depend on how you deploy it and what safeguards you put in place, including high availability and disaster recovery, et cetera. All the hooks for that are in the product, however, it's up to you to decide how you're going to use those hooks.

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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.
768,857 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Chris Wahl - PeerSpot reviewer
Operations Engineer at West Bend Mutual Insurance Company

One patch had some issues, but the fix pack was very helpful. Other than that, we haven't had any stability issues with this product. So I'd rate it very highly.

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AL
IT Supply Chain Manager at Alicorp

It is a powerful, stable tool.

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

I have not had any downtime with Helix Control-M. All the upgrades are scheduled, and they give us a time window when they think they are going to schedule them, and we adjust. I have not seen anybody notice it. The jobs get held before the update, and they start automatically after the update. If anybody noticed it, that was because I had to tell them that a maintenance window was coming up and to be aware of it.

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EY
IT MSP at Ryerson

The stability is very good. My impressions of the stability are very positive.

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

It's very stable. We have no complaints in this area. The application is very well built and it is reliable. We were also very focused on the idea of availability when we built our environment.  We are setup with both high availability and a fail-over environments. If we were to have problems with a particular server, we have the secondary to fail over to.  Or, worst case, another environment to use in our secondary datacenter.

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

Version 9 was very stable. Once they started adding a lot of the newer Java components, the stability suffered. It seems to have gotten better in version 9.0.20, but that's could be my basic perception. 

We run a lot of database client jobs. There are some things that we've implemented that I understand can contribute to the agent instability. We sometimes extract a lot of database output and massage that output using other scripts. I've noticed there are certain things that you cannot do with it, or there are some things that contribute to the instability. For example, in the output scanning functionality, there certainly is a size limit. You probably don't want to scan anything too large because that's going to put a lot of resources on the environment.

In addition, there are times when the agent becomes unresponsive. The jobs get submitted, but nothing executes. There is no alerting function. These are the examples of instability that I've noticed. Overall, the main application itself, the EM, and the scheduler have been pretty stable.

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Shane Bailey - PeerSpot reviewer
Automation Engineer at CARFAX

I love it. It is rock solid. It is very stable.

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

It's a highly stable product. It has to be—it runs your business. It's very mature in that arena.

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

The stability is very good. 

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

Its stability is good.

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

The stability is an eight out 10. It's good.

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GM
Control-M Administrator at Cognizant

This is a pretty stable solution. We have not had any downtime.

A couple of times, the agent has gone down unexpectedly. However, in terms of the EM and server, it's pretty stable.

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

It's very stable. In the last year, there have only been two issues. One was our fault, due to our configuration. The other was because of the Control-M application. We had to call support to get them to solve it. But overall, it's a very stable application.

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

Control-M has been stable for us since we implemented it, four or five years ago. We have not had any problems with the database, file system, or scheduling component.

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

The product is stable.

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

It's fairly stable. I don't recall any specific issues. 

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

It has been good so far, and I haven't seen many issues in terms of performance.

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

We've had issues only twice in 20 years. It is very stable. I will say that they have improved it. Originally, when we put in a Windows version of it, we had problems with the database that they were using at the time, which was a Postgres database. Then, at one point, we decided to go to Solaris and run it on Solaris. We had it on Solaris for six years. In six years, I don't think we ever rebooted the server. It ran for six years without any hiccups, any problems. The Solaris system was rock solid. 

Now, the problems we run into, if we run into any problems, are Windows-based problems. Those Windows-based problems are, for example, if you don't reboot a server once a month, which, thank God we do, you can have issues. We reboot as we have to patch monthly now and we have to reboot it every month. However, we would see if we went two, three months on Windows, that we would start seeing some problems. Rebooting it took care of it.

That said, that's a Windows problem, not so much a Control-M issue, as we see problems on Windows servers that run for two or three months in any application.

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

The platform is good. We haven't had any major outages. The stability is there.

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

It seems stable. I haven't rolled the solution out to a very large environment yet. The solution we're working on right now seems to be working fine. All the issues we've seen have to do with us figuring out connectivity between Control-M and the cloud services, however, I haven't had any experiences with issues around stability with Control-M.

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

In past versions, there were issues with stability and it was a negative experience for us. However, in the version we have now, stability has improved. At this point, the product is good and stable.

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

It is very stable. If we are using agents, it runs without any issues. I have sometimes found issues when we are running it with an agentless solution. However, with the agent, it does not have many issues. It will have an issue once or twice a year.

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

I haven't seen any significant issues with Control-M in several years, e.g., we haven't had to call support. So, it has been very stable.

It runs all the time. We are running thousands of jobs with little issue, especially when I compare it to some of the other systems that we use for other things. It has been very stable.

One to two people are needed for day-to-day administration. I usually do it myself.

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

The stability is fairly good. We haven't had any serious issues. 

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

Other than the database connections that we've had and as of, I believe when we upgraded or moved away from Java using OpenJDK, it's been hit or miss. I know that we've had a few instances where our jobs just stopped processing, but we're not sure if that's related to the application itself or if that's something in our environment, but overall I am personally okay with the way that it runs.

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

The stability of Control-M has Not been great. A big thing we've been trying to work on with BMC is observability. Modern applications should be observable and resilient, but we're finding that sometimes Control-M is not very resilient and many times Control-M is not very observable. We're working with BMC to try and figure out how we can externally monitor this application. 

We are using Dynatrace because of the problems we've had with Control-M. If we stood up Control-M and never had any problems, we probably wouldn't be too worried about being able to observe the processes and the queues and the communication between processes. But because we've had so many problems, it has forced us to dig in. We can't wait for a problem to happen and wait for a week for support to tell us how to fix it. We can't do that in a production environment. We have to know before a problem happens so that we can be proactive and not reactive. That's been a big struggle that we're continuing to work with BMC on.

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

I have never faced any issues with stability. It is very good.

10 to 20 people are administering it.

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ST
Junior Unix Specialist at Oy Samlink Ab

The stability is pretty good. We haven't had any issues with Control-M being unstable in the last two years. They are up and running 24/7.

One person is the minimum needed for day-to-day administration of Control-M. We have three admins, who are also our SFTP and file transfer team. Someone just decided that they should be the Control-M admins, so they made all three of us go through the admin classes. Now, we have three admins. 

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DG
Administrator at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

It's very stable. We've had no downtime with it. The only time that ever happens is if we have lost the server but that's been very rare.

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BK
Electrical Engineer at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

Control-M is stable. That's one reason the company chose them.

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EA
System Engineering Manager at a marketing services firm with 10,001+ employees

The platform has been great. I don't think we have had any downtime besides our upgrade process.

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NP
Director at a performing arts with 5,001-10,000 employees

We can work with jobs that should run daily because of it. When we need to do an upgrade, it is really important for us not to have any downtime.

We are always afraid to install the latest version. However, with Control-M, it is really comfortable to move onto the latest version because of the stability. When I worked as a consultant, I never had any problems. Even when we had Control-M in two data centers, if one goes down, then we can run Control-M in another data center. Few software solutions have the stability of Control-M. 

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AH
IT Specialist TWS at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

The stability of the solution is very good. It's very reliable and the performance is good. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.

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

It is the most stable solution that we have had. It has been working on the mainframe for two years without any problem. It is a very stable product.

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

It always works. There is never a problem with Control-M. If there is a problem it is either with the server Control-M runs on or a scheduling error that was made. 

Control-M is always running and never breaking. I always tease server people about rebooting, since my application is always running.

We were on version 6 and went to version 8 about four years ago. Everything worked just like it used to, but it was more streamlined. When we went to version 9 last year, it was even more streamlined. Things just looked more up-to-date, and it was more web-based. 

Sometimes, I don't think of what can happen next, but I see the new version, and think, "Oh wow, that was a great idea!"

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ZW
Operator /Assistant Scheduler at Engen

Over the last three upgrades, Control-M has improved quite a bit. When I joined our department, Control-M didn't have a good reputation because it was always falling over. All our issues were addressed by Control-M with their upgrades. 

In the latest version, we find it has been extremely stable. We haven't had many failures as far as the program is concerned.

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DG
Administrator at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Control-M is very stable and we've had no major issues with it.

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VJ
Systems Engineer - Senior Control M Admin at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

I have not encountered any stability issues. Control-M, as a tool, has been pretty stable. We did come across some compatibility or connectivity issues at times, which usually were resolved really quickly, as BMC’s wonderful tech team would have released a patch beforehand.

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

Control-M is 100% stable.

For day-to-day administration of Control-M, normally less than five people are required in our organization.

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PW
VP Control-M Scheduling at Northern Trust

In some parts of Control-M the stability is good, in some parts it's not so good.

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

We have not encountered any stability issues. Control-M provides a highly stable environment. Fix packs are released regularly and immediately upon discovering bugs.

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

This solution is highly stable with a good customer support team.

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BB
Application Automation Deveoper at iPSL

It's stable ninety-nine percent of the time. Even the other one percent could be because of the funky underlying infrastructure/network setup.

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LF
Manager Digital Solutions at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees

For our shop, the tool is 99.9 percent reliable. We have very few instances of disruption with the tool.

We don't have any complaints about the usability. We like what it does. There are no issues with usability of the tool.

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

I can honestly say, I only had a stability issue once. Other than that one time, Control-M has been a very stable application.

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AR
Production Engineer at Alphaserve Technologies®

It is a very stable solution and BMC, the parent company, really comes up with tech packs and upgrades, which add new features and also resolve issues. Also, their knowledge base is quite full, which helps a lot to find the solution easily from the website.

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

I have not encountered any stability issues.

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DT
Digital Business Automation Team Leader at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

It is very stable. We hardly get calls in respect to issues on Control-M, particularly on version 9.0.19. 9.0.20 is still pretty new in terms of deployments. However, with version 9.0.18. I have had a couple of problems from customers.

You barely need one person for customer maintenance because the system is pretty stable. Of course, if it is version 9.0.18, the number of support cases that come in are more compared to version 9.0.19. We also get information requests from the customer where they might have audit requests or want to enable certain protocols because of security compliance within their organization. In these cases, they reach out to us. 

It is not that we are always involved with the customer. It is not an onsite model. If there is an issue with the product, the person calls. We have 20 customers whom we manage at the moment for BMC. That is just done with three people: an onsite resource and two employees, including myself. The onsite employee is with a telecom vendor within the UAE. His job is monitoring and maintaining the system as well as assisting the customer. He does everything in respect to Control-M at the customer site, e.g., defining jobs, monitoring jobs, executing jobs, and making sure that they are done properly. Another of my colleagues and myself deal with all the other customers from a project and support perspective. It is primarily support because once a project is done, then a customer has support with us. We manage those cases, involving ourselves in those cases. We understand what is required. If we have the information already and know how to do it, we will give them the procedure, etc. If we cannot do it, we get in touch with BMC to get the relevant answers.

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

I have not encountered any stability issues.

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RR
Manager at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees

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.

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

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

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

It has old architecture, so it is sustainable.

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HB
IT Operations Specialist with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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FS
Presales- BMC Software at TechAccess

It is stable.

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it_user520743 - PeerSpot reviewer
Middleware Analyst at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

No issues experienced with stability at all.

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it_user506682 - PeerSpot reviewer
Operational Manager at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

I have not encountered any stability issues.

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

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. 

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

I did not encounter any stability issues.

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

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.

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

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.

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it_user518730 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Consultant at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees

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

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

Control-M is a stable and reliable solution. 

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

It is very stable.

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SD
IT Manager at a consumer goods company with 201-500 employees

We don't use the program that much, so it is stable enough for us.

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JH
Team Lead at a transportation company with 5,001-10,000 employees

It is stable.

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

No issues with stability.

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

I did not encounter any stability issues.

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SL
Technical Director at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

The solution is very stable.

We upgrade versions according to the plan. Adequate testing is done before upgrading.

Two people are required for day-to-day maintenance.

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JP
E-Business Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

The solution is very stable. We have our mainframe as well, which has not been bad at processing, and it's pretty stable. With the application of Control-M, we've seen minimal downtime. If there has been downtime, it hasn't been with the application. It has been with the hardware, and you can't get around that part of it.

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it_user697383 - PeerSpot reviewer
Workload Automation Wizard at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees
it_user676545 - PeerSpot reviewer
Works at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

I have no particular issue to report.

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

I have not encountered any stability issues.

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

The solution is quite stable. It's a reliable product. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.

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JL
Software Consultant at a consultancy with 11-50 employees

It is stable. There are no glitches. It has been working well from the start.

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

It's just like anything else in that league. It's very stable. We are not experiencing instability or crashes. These are mature products.

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it_user514314 - PeerSpot reviewer
Assistant Director at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

I have encountered very few stability issues; it’s highly stable.

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

We are having issues with failover working correctly but we are working with BMC Support.

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

We have not encountered any stability issues. BMC Control-M is very stable in any version.

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

Initially, we encountered stability issues with the V9 install, but this could be more to do with the VM infrastructure and networks than Control-M.

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it_user676302 - PeerSpot reviewer
Produktionssteuerung at a wellness & fitness company with 10,001+ employees

The GUI had some problems in the early stages, but those seemed to have been solved.

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it_user512913 - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

I have not encountered any stability issues.

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it_user500652 - PeerSpot reviewer
Production Control Analyst with 501-1,000 employees

I did not encounter any stability issues. The "dead weights" that I referred to above were in the scheduling development side of the product and did not affect the live processes.

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it_user687186 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Support at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

The product is stable, but in our environment, due to the huge amount of data, the product is a little slow.

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

There were no stability issues.

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it_user538239 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior IT Specialist at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

I did not encounter any issues with stability.

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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

It's very stable.

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it_user783723 - PeerSpot reviewer
Database Security Specialist at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
it_user709788 - PeerSpot reviewer
Production Engineer at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
it_user705060 - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant, Production Control Services at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Not that I'm aware of.

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it_user505659 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr System Analyst at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

I have not encountered any stability issues. Control-M is a bulletproof product and very stable.

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it_user500040 - PeerSpot reviewer
Integration Consultant at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

I did not encounter any stability issues.

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

I have not encountered any stability issues.

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

There were no stability issues as such. There were only issues in the appearance, after the upgrade.

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

Most stability problems are network connected, i.e., communication goes down with servers where you have a client.

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SM
Technical Consultant at Atgen Software Solutions LLP

I have not encountered any issues with stability.

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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.
768,857 professionals have used our research since 2012.