Nolio Release Automation Room for Improvement

Akhilesh B N - PeerSpot reviewer
DevOps Delivery Engineer at Barclays Capital

When I started using Nolio around eight months ago, a challenge was the lack of relevant information and related support for learning. There's also not many instructional materials and videos on platforms like YouTube, especially for a very basic user. The tool might be somewhat challenging for new users initially, but becomes more accessible with familiarity.

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it_user348072 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager Continuous Delivery and Integration Team at a insurance company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Stability could be improved. For functionality, it needs versioning.

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it_user372552 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director DevOps at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We're using it more on the deployment side. What we really want to do is see a stronger or easier user interface. I think the biggest complaint that we've gotten from the development side is that the user interface, the experience is not as good as they'd like it to be. It's hard to comprehend. We've overcome that with a lot of our own solutions, but we'd really like to see that user interface, and would like to see them get into more of the release orchestration aspect. We're actually using an internal solution for that. I know they're heading in that direction, we're really looking for that, and again, that needs to be ease of use. That user experience is critical. The developers have their critical time frames, and for them to figure out and comprehend a new tool is not acceptable. We need it to be simplistic and easy to use. There are some challenges, we've overcome a lot of them though.

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Buyer's Guide
Release Automation
March 2024
Find out what your peers are saying about Broadcom, IBM, Digital.ai and others in Release Automation. Updated: March 2024.
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it_user373059 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager, Enterprise Release and Deployment at TIAA-CREF

The release orchestration and release automation tool. The automation tool is a very good deployment engine but it's not fitting our release orchestration process so we have to go for another tool to handle the orchestration, integrate the tool with the release automation. I'm looking for more features in the release orchestration.

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it_user352854 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Governance Manager with 1,001-5,000 employees

As we're just in the initial implementation phase, I can't say there's any room for improvement, save for maybe the complexity of it because of all the functionalities. I can see why it was chosen from the POC. Once we've got the initial implementation over and done with, we can then start to look at more of what the tool has to offer.

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it_user587598 - PeerSpot reviewer
Automation Sme, Release Manager (Grm) at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

The automation designer GUI slows down the host when it is launched. The reporting feature is not excellent. You cannot import/export the workflows effectively between multiple CA RA environments.

Additionally, this product is only able to automate the technology actions when the technology vendor provides CLI, web service calls, and an API for automation. It does not have the capability to connect to the GUI directly and perform sequential actions.

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it_user577341 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Systems Engineer Web Logic Portal Operations/Tech Services at a hospitality company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The learning curve for this tool is somewhat steep. While setting up a basic deployment process is simple, improving those processes to include integration into monitoring tools or implementing complex deployment processes can be a challenege. Making the product more intuitive, specifically around process design, would be a great improvement.

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it_user558294 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Vice President, Solution Delivery & DevOps at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

There is a continuous delivery version of this product that I believe will solve some of the problems we have; so I'm looking forward to it. Currently we do deployment automation and I want to get to release automation, which is automating everything from start to end. That's what I'm looking for.

There are some technologies that this product doesn't support such as some emerging technologies that we need to build the interfaces for; so if that came as a readymade/off-the-shelf feature, it would help us.

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it_user558291 - PeerSpot reviewer
Associate Director at a financial services firm

I would like to see a more robust solution. There are few downsides which I already expressed to CA. I'm sure they will address them. For example, I would like to see more disaster recovery base solutions and things like that. I've already done that a few times.

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RK
Manager at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

We want to expand our work to Amazon or Azure to the public cloud. We have Kubernetes on-prem and I want to know if Nolio can handle it.

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DP
Software Engineering Director at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees

In terms of its performance, we have struggled a little bit because we have multiple instances around the world without a proper support team behind it. After several years we got the new version, and the upgrade was very painful. We had several issues or defects, but CA was responsive and, in the end, they created a fix-pack which resolved the problems. We managed to upgrade.

It could use better integration with development tools. UCD is better integrated than CA Release Automation.

Another concern with CA Release Automation is that Automic was acquired by CA recently. We're a bit concerned that CA strategy is going with Automic, that CA Release Automation is dead. They are not investing in it too much. For new customers, they're proposing Automic online. They even approached us at the end of last year and asked if we would consider switching to Automic. They do say that in the next two or three years we don't need to worry. They will still provide support for CA Release Automation. But we're not sure how CA Release Automation will evolve.

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it_user566886 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager - IT at a aerospace/defense firm with 10,001+ employees

Have an agentless deployment: Right now, we had to install agents on all deployment servers, for it to work with the CA RA tool. Currently, when a deployment server needs to connect with the CA RA tool, it needs an agent installed on it. So, when we deploy to 100 machines, we need to install 100 CA agents on each one of them, i.e., even in the production servers.

I also think that the cost of this product is high. There are other cheaper deployment solutions available in the market.

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RV
CA Lisa Developer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The configuration of the solution is a bit difficult to maneuver. They should work to make it easier.

I'm not sure if there are any features missing from the solution.

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MC
SQA Manager at a tech services company

Integration with other technologies such as Dockers. The solution has the capability of integration with other technologies, and I can do this without problems. The issue is that all the tasks are performed and managed in an ad-hoc manner. I think that it will be interesting to increase the standards.

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it_user572826 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Engineer at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

Some features that it's currently missing are the components that CA has put into their Continuous Delivery Edition product. That product should probably be combined with this product, instead of being a separate product. I would say that that's one of the issues that I currently see with it. I know that they put it in there as separate products but long term, it should really be combined.

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it_user572853 - PeerSpot reviewer
Engineering Manager at EchoStar

Indicating room for improvement is difficult, because we're so immersed in what we're doing right now. There's a lot of things that we can see that can be included. Working with our consultant, he's helping us address some of those issues, especially with tracking and capturing metrics. Our metrics are for very short time periods; capturing those metrics and being able to present them in a way that my management can understand.

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it_user571830 - PeerSpot reviewer
FNet DevOps Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Tags are virtual snapshots of different deployment processes. Over time, if you often update your processes, it gets hard to track what exact changes were made between the different tags of the same process. This functionality is not working. Therefore, it would be great if the vendor could improve the processes tag comparison feature for better process version control.

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it_user558546 - PeerSpot reviewer
Platform Development Manager at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

We would like mainframe automation deployment. It is one of the biggest components in our organization. For distributed applications, we obviously need to have more on the mainframe, as well, so that we can have 100% accomplishment. So, we would like to see mainframe automation.

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it_user572850 - PeerSpot reviewer
Engineering Program Manager at EchoStar Corporation

How the product could really improve is when we were actually given the product and started to implement it, we were looking to CA to provide best-case scenarios. But because we're so unique, we had no templates to work off of. CA could really work together with their other product lines to give us guidance on governance on how to implement the product; that would be great.

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it_user541449 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Administrator at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

The system seems unstable as we are constantly having to re-connect execution servers and agents that go offline. In addition, the upgrade process has been painful in our experience and we usually run into issues requiring support assistance.

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it_user568338 - PeerSpot reviewer
Tech Lead at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

I would suggest that, rather than just concentrating on release automation and management, this tool could provide for more automation in different areas, such as database automation (we already have this but still can be improved further).

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it_user581823 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior System Analyst at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

CA Release Automation has a large number of actions and it fits the needs in 99% of the cases. However, sometimes a specific function/behavior is needed and we are forced to call an external command to solve the problem. For example, in regards to the SVN actions, I had a problem where I needed to check for lock and unlock, if needed. However, I could only achieve this by using an external script.

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it_user210456 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager, DevOps with 51-200 employees
  • Release Management
  • Cache management for agents
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MC
SQA Manager at a tech services company

I would like to see integration with other technologies, such as Docker.

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it_user558582 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Project Manager at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees

We need to see how they're going to harness Big Data in terms of Java.net, distributed stack, and going into the mainframe.

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it_user269043 - PeerSpot reviewer
Tools Administrator with 1,001-5,000 employees

It does not support integration with Jenkins for .Net

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it_user205848 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager, DevOps at a hospitality company with 51-200 employees

The UI is very quirky, with numerous small frustrating bugs. While it is possible to script, the REST API is nearly impossible to use and the old CLI support has many undocumented features.

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it_user208614 - PeerSpot reviewer
Arquitecto de soluciones CA LISA RELEASE Automation at a financial services firm

Maybe user management, and more hardware architecture, like a mainframe.

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it_user280932 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr Software Engineer with 10,001+ employees

Zero down time during production deployment. Currently we use the 'Bank' concept for scalability.

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it_user576462 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Consultant at a tech services company

I would like to see:

  • Improving the shared component features
  • Porting the versioning feature of the shared components to the classic components
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NV
Software Build & Release Architect/ DevOps at HMS

I know that continuous delivery's already coming, but I still need to see how it will work out. What I personally want to see is more features for data warehousing deployment. Right now, I prefer Informatica. We want an action pack to deploy completely on Informatica. All actions for DB2 and its SQL servers are implemented and almost all the actions for WebLogic. I would love to see something coming out for Informatica.

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it_user6813 - PeerSpot reviewer
Architect at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees

It could use more plug-ins – at least in v2. Mostly it would have been nice to see it integrated with Jenkins and JIRA to create the tickets, and to be a plug-in for Quality Center.

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it_user205227 - PeerSpot reviewer
Release Automation Specialist with 10,001+ employees

We are using an old version and a new version is now on the market. As the latest version has lots of new features, I am not certain what improvements are required until we use it.

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it_user558447 - PeerSpot reviewer
Engineer III at a tech consulting company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The most important thing is the release automation. There are a few things which we already raised at a recent conference, such as the release XML. In order to replace that, we needed to go in the server, delete it, and then recreate the pre-plan. This is time consuming. It should be straightforward from the web application server. There are too many steps, and we already raised this issue in the forum and I don't know whether the RA people are taking care of that or not.

I think the action creation could be much easier. During the process of transition from RA guys to actual CA people, they should have given us some kind of training on that process. There wasn't enough training from CA.

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it_user345525 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager Engineering at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • More stability and customizations
  • Better integration with new open source tools
  • Even more stability for the new version
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it_user215694 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Engineer at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The performance.

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it_user215880 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Consultant with 1,001-5,000 employees

It is being improved regularly, there are new versions of 5.5, 5.6 and so on. Stability is an area for improvement.

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it_user589380 - PeerSpot reviewer
Specialist at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

I would like to see a better way to re-use a task. If you are not aware of how to use and re-use the task, you can mix their content or lose data.

When you are creating a new flow, you should reuse a previously created task. My advice is to create a new task, even if it is similar to the one you already created. Every task has specific information. When you try to reuse it, you can overwrite the specific data from another flow that is using the same task.

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it_user295626 - PeerSpot reviewer
Middleware and Automation Engineer with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • Error message descriptions need to be more accurate and specific.
  • Error handling needs to be improved in some of the action packs. 
  • UI is a little complicated to understand for the new user and needs some improvements.
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it_user207675 - PeerSpot reviewer
Build and Release Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

This product lacks proper documentation with illustrated examples.

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it_user216678 - PeerSpot reviewer
Release/Build Technologist, PM with 51-200 employees

To visually find a particular process, flow or action, the GUI needs to be improved, and also made faster as well.

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it_user215889 - PeerSpot reviewer
Devops Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Some of the existing action packs still have bugs which need to be fixed.

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it_user585873 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager Engineering at a retailer with 5,001-10,000 employees
  • Better integration with new-age tools
  • Open-source integrations
  • Establish a niche with newer players like Chef and Ansible
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it_user373512 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager, SCM and Release at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees

Well, I'm looking forward to seeing different kinds of scheduling options and being able to troubleshoot more real time if something does go wrong. Those would be two things that would be very helpful to us.

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it_user265827 - PeerSpot reviewer
Key Account Customer Service Technician at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Maybe the user interface. We always can do something simpler, even for professionals.

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LG
DevOps Engineer at a comms service provider with 501-1,000 employees

I don't think there are enough action packs for each App Deployment function.

There is also a lack of online documentation or step-by-step guides, especially for the CA RA product.

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it_user558180 - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal Analysit at a tech consulting company with 1-10 employees

Of course, we need to test this more, but I want to see much more seamless integration between Release Automation and CA Service Virtualization or DevTest.

Right now we have to do a lot of intervention, and we would rather automate that particular process also. What happens is that not only are we deploying the product, but we are unit testing it and making sure that even before a user accesses it, we are confident that the deployment went well.

Complete automation is very critical for us, and I rate CA SV 8/10 because it is moving in that direction, but it's not quite there yet.

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it_user3036 - PeerSpot reviewer
Operations Expert at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees
- Can Nolio make a coffee.......... View full review »
it_user570954 - PeerSpot reviewer
DevOps Engineer - Release Management with 501-1,000 employees

The level of abstraction in the VPL needs to improve. There needs to be some improvement in the technical issues, in order to better relate with the machine's infrastructure and network support.

For it to work properly, a VPL must abstract the concept to where it applies, which in this case is a release process. Although in my opinion it is very nice to see it applied in this process in the market, I found, however, that it still needed to improve and abstract more in the aspects of infrastructures, where they were applied. This could make the process more easier for the batch setting variables for an instance.

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it_user3063 - PeerSpot reviewer
Architect at a insurance company with 501-1,000 employees
A task for using a dynamic language like Groovy could be very useful in order to create easily simple tasks. But I am sure it will come... View full review »
Buyer's Guide
Release Automation
March 2024
Find out what your peers are saying about Broadcom, IBM, Digital.ai and others in Release Automation. Updated: March 2024.
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.