Stonebranch Universal Automation Center could improve the analytics.

It can be hard to manage the task monitor. We are still working with the vendor, and we are trying to make the changes as per our requirements. We are asking them to build some new solutions so they can be helpful in the new releases in our organization.

In terms of the task monitor, we should not have to try to calculate how many hours back we have to check or monitor a job.

We'd like to have some sort of mobile app in the future. 

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.

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.

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.

It's not available on the cloud, so they should take that due to safety, security, and scalability.

There is room for improvement with its connectivity with the Microsoft SRS system. It is very weak. They keep telling us it works with it, and technically it does, but it does not provide a lot of visibility. We have lost a lot of visibility migrating to Stonebranch, compared with just running tasks on the SRS server. That's really about the only thing that is a sore point for us.

We don't really use the Stonebranch Marketplace. We looked at it earlier and management really wasn't impressed. So admin was told not to worry about it. It could be that if we were looking at it now, now that we're smarter, I think we would find things there. But we have gotten used to the way we're doing things now, so we don't want to rock the boat.

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.

It can't handle negative written codes. 

If a program was providing a negative value, it wouldn't be able to handle it well.

There some issues with the conversions initially and with the initial simulations. These are areas that could be improved.

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.

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

Lifecycle management.

• The API's need to fully meet the capabilities of the user interface.
• Better support of workload balancers (F5).

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)

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

• Virtual resource priorities could be better.
• Maybe in the future, the use of queues.
• Promoting objects to multiple environments at once.

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. 

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

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.

• 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.

• FTP tasks have been an issue. 
• It has also been challenging to support PGP encryption which is a fairly standard encryption method.
  

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

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

The product is very new to us still. Therefore, it's difficult to gauge if there's anything missing. We're still learning about the product as we go.