ActiveBatch from Advanced Systems Concepts in New Jersey is IT workload automation software.
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Rundeck
Score 8.7 out of 10
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Rundeck is runbook automation for incident management, business continuity, and self-service operations, with the goal of fewer interruptions. The vendor describes the Rundeck product family as the engine for Ops as Service. With Rundeck deployed in an organization, they state users will improve the capacity of IT operations teams, get rid of bottlenecks, and scale faster.
Pagerduty announced its intent to acquire Rundeck September 2020.
Any large business or organisation that wants to manage their workload effectively and with the least amount of room for error might choose the ActiveBatch Automation tool. Being a consultant I feel that It aids in task automation and has the flexibility to change in response to varying company requirements. It helps to save huge time by doing all the repetitive tasks on daily basis. During the patching activity the schedulers can be stopped. It also help by alerting us if any system/job is down so that SLA can be saved. Overall ActiveBatch Automation stands as a dependable cornerstone for ensuring the seamless operation of our tasks.
Rundeck is a really good solution to formalize , standardize and automate your infrastructure operational run book. It can be also used in combination with your monitoring solution to auto heal your services. As for example when you get a specific alert, instead of triggering your notification channel to first trigger the Rundeck job to try and fix the issues (service restart etc..) and only then if the problem still persist to escalate and notify through an alert. It is also super handy to run all tasks from a central location and making sure there is no other person running the same job on the same servers at the same time, been able to see statistic about how fast or successful a job runs is also a big plus.
Businesses can use ActiveBatch to plan tasks based on parameters like frequency, dependencies, and the time of day. By automating typical actions like backups and data transfers, businesses can make sure that crucial operations go off without a hitch.
Multiple systems and apps can be used in complicated workflows that ActiveBatch can automate. For instance, it can automate a workflow for processing orders from beginning to end, from the customer order through inventory control and delivery through the processing of invoices and payments.
Files can be sent between many platforms and systems safely with ActiveBatch. Transfers to cloud-based storage systems like Amazon S3 and Microsoft Azure are also included in this. SFTP and FTP transfers are also included.
Sudo privileges, this can be attained but it's not obvious when trying to build a job that needs to sudo up.
Have a human time schedule instead of a linux cron schedule timer when creating jobs
When calling a job from the API, the ability to pass back a result parameter that a job outputs, i.e., a job creates a job ticket reference and returns the reference, the API call will just return if the job fired correctly and not the ticket reference. Getting the ticket reference needs some engineering to attain; for example, you may need to write it to a file, then another job read that file to find out what it is.
It would be very nice to just be able to fire off the job on the API. The API sits and waits for the return and gets back any outputted data in the one call. I know it's an API, but it would be nice to have the option to sit and wait for the result.
We can easily add new plans/jobs in our batch schedules. Also, coordination with reporting and QA jobs is simple to do. Building schedules, restarting jobs, triggering dependencies is easy to understand. The system is very stable and allows us to easily see overall processing times.
The workload automation solution is based on the specific needs of an organization, as well as the features, capabilities, and costs of various solutions. A thorough evaluation process and consideration of these factors can help ensure the selection of a solution that aligns with overall business objectives and meets the specific needs of the organization.
Ansible Tower (or AWX) is very poor in comparison to Rundeck and only runs well Ansible talks versus Rundeck can support all kind of scripts and tools. Rundeck UI is much more intuitive and robust
I have not run numbers to determine hard impact, but a quick estimate is that at least one job is running for a average of about 6 hours per day - that 6 hours, if done by hand, would equate to about 30 - 40 hours per day (and in some cases, could not be duplicated manually, as the job repeats faster than a person could accomplish one cycle.)
