Stonebranch Universal Automation Center Room for Improvement

One hiccup we've had is due to the fact that we have other internal scheduling tools. We're able to talk to them, but we have trouble with some of the networking between them, so we're still trying to work out the kinks there. Also, there's the z/OS agent. We've had troubles with GDGs, with recovery. Say we have a job that fails on a Saturday and there are other jobs that update that generation. If they go to fix the one from Friday, it picks up right where it left off. It doesn't know about the future generations that were created. We've been trying to have Stonebranch correct that for us, and that's probably the biggest open issue. And they're the hardest ones to install and upgrade. Mainframe, in general, seems to be a hurdle, in my opinion. View full review »

There is a component called the OMS, which is the message broker. We rely on infrastructure, resiliency, and availability for that piece. If that could change to be highly available just as a software component, so that we don't have to provide the high-available storage, etc. for it, that would be a plus. It would just be cheaper to run. View full review »

While the resiliency is very good, it does have one point of failure that we are concerned about. We would like to run it in high availability in multiple clusters, but it has to read and write to one flat file. To us, that's a single point of failure that will prevent us from moving it to clustering like we would want to do. Therefore, we cannot run it on totally separate clusters and geographic separate databases in geographic dispersed areas. We would like to have one in Georgia and one located in Ohio with failover. Since the requirements are to write to one file, we just can't do that. That one file has to exist somewhere. We would like the solution to work better with SSIS and SSRS. Right now, it just starts the job but does not give us any visibility into whether the job ran correctly or not. It tells us it started it, but it doesn't tell us how long it ran, any of the output, etc. We have lost that sort of visibility by going to Stonebranch. View full review »

Usually, when there's something that I need from them, I put in a request for an enhancement. It typically takes a few months, but they deliver. For instance, I have a request regarding our agent on the mainframe. It may time out when communicating to the Universal Controller, when the mainframe is extremely busy. That can cause a task which is running at that time to not see the results of the job that ran on the mainframe. It happens sporadically during times of really busy CPU usage. We're expecting that enhancement from them in the fourth quarter. View full review »

The Universal Controller is decent for the money it costs. We host it on-promise - some local virtual servers. It still doesn't have all the features and functionality of our mainframe scheduler, but hopefully it will get there. It needs some work to have full features, compared to other products that are out there, specifically IBM's Workload Scheduler. Also, regarding the Controller, there should be a much cleaner method of looking at dependencies between workflows. I would also like to see, when there is a workflow that's going to kick in at a certain date, the option to pick the time for those dates. View full review »

* Virtual resource priorities could be better. * Maybe in the future, the use of queues. * Promoting objects to multiple environments at once. View full review »

The FTP tasks. Ever since UAC changed to using cURL for FTP, we have had a lot of issues. 90% or more of our FTP tasks have been moved away from the UAC task type to our own FTP task using WS-FTP pro (which has more flexibility, that UAC does not offer such as PGP encryption) View full review »

REST API can be improved by exposing more information about running instances. For example, the failed error message of a Stored procedure task cannot be seen through the API. Other features that would be helpful is to dynamically insert new tasks to be run at run time when certain conditions are met. Currently, that's possible with a web service task but only one task can be inserted at a time for one instance which is limiting possibilities. View full review »

* FTP tasks have been an issue. * It has also been challenging to support PGP encryption which is a fairly standard encryption method. View full review »

For me, Stonebranch can do more than integration and scheduling, like real-time interfacing services and point-to-point to integration. With this, we don't want to invest money on multiple tools for different purposes. View full review »

In my opinion, training materials and FAQ/support should be improved. For people who start using UAC in a DevOps model, it's hard to understand configuration and how UAC works, how to create workflows, etc. More online classes or tutorials. View full review »

More number of FAQs should be provided because I found it hard to configure when I started using this tool. View full review »

* A migration tool for encrypted username/password to use the new keystore feature. * Enabling proxy certificates for IBM's System SSL would be great. View full review »

Lifecycle management. View full review »

Dealing with customer requirements and enhancements. The process now is a little bit non-transparent. View full review »

Have a better graphical workflow overview, more information on icons, the UI uses. We would like to have information in dependencies in virtual recourses. View full review »

* The API's need to fully meet the capabilities of the user interface. * Better support of workload balancers (F5). View full review »

In my opinion, scheduler sometimes is getting turned off due to causes that Opswise was not predicted. View full review »

* Run in Unix and Windows environments Additional features: * Migration tool for encrypted username/password to use the new Keystore feature * UDM third-party file transfer * Enable proxy certificates for IBM System SSL. View full review »