Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS, Microsoft Visual Studio Team System) is an agile development product that is an extension of the Microsoft Visual Studio architecture. Azure DevOps includes software development, collaboration, and reporting capabilities.
$2
per GB (first 2GB free)
JAMS
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
JAMS is a centralized workload automation and job scheduling solution that runs, monitors, and manages jobs and workflows. Reliably orchestrate the critical IT processes that run your business from a single pane of glass.
$9,996
per year
Pricing
Azure DevOps
JAMS
Editions & Modules
Azure Artifacts
$2
per GB (first 2GB free)
Basic Plan
$6
per user per month (first 5 users free)
Azure Pipelines - Self-Hosted
$15
per extra parallel job (1 free parallel job with unlimited minutes)
Azure Pipelines - Microsoft Hosted
$40
per parallel job (1,800 minutes free with 1 free parallel job)
Basic + Test Plan
$52
per user per month
Core
9,996.00
per year
Advanced
Customized Pricing
per year
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Azure DevOps
JAMS
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
—
- Core: For small teams getting started with automation. Core Integrations: PowerShell, SQL, Azure Data Factory, Python, 20+ others.
- Advanced: Comprehensive solution for large-scale operations. Core Integrations: SAP, JDE, Ellucian Banner, Informatica, Mainframe and Power Systems.
Azure DevOps works well when you’ve got larger delivery efforts with multiple teams and a lot of moving parts, and you need one place to plan work, track it properly, and see how everything links together. It’s especially useful when delivery and development are closely tied and you want backlog items, code and releases connected rather than spread across tools. Where it’s less of a fit is for small teams or simple pieces of work, as it can feel like more setup and process than you really need, and non-technical users often struggle with the interface. It also isn’t great if you want instant, easy programme-level views or a very visual planning experience without putting time into configuration.
It's currently one of the best of the lower entry cost options out there, as it currently is a set license cost, not based on the number of jobs executed. In the hands of a good script writer and users with workflow experience, it's a powerful tool to accomplish just about any process that you have a need to complete.
The Activity Monitor clearly shows the Running Jobs, and Jobs that are to run soon. Successful Jobs can be viewed as well. The Refresh of this monitor is completely customizable to your liking.
Job Definitions are very well organized by use of Folders. This simplifies the structure of how to best Implement JAMS Jobs, including the ability to provide specific properties on each folder - whereby Jobs will inherit these properties.
Connectivity to servers is well thought out by having Shortcuts to include Credentials and Connection Store for server information.
JAMS Jobs can be controlled via System Resources. This is very powerful and is a very useful configuration found in JAMS.
I did mention it has good visibility in terms of linking, but sometimes items do get lost, so if there was a better way to manage that, that would be great.
The wiki is not the prettiest thing to look at, so it could have refinements there.
I don't think our organization will stray from using VSTS/TFS as we are now looking to upgrade to the 2012 version. Since our business is software development and we want to meet the requirements of CMMI to deliver consistent and high quality software, this SDLC management tool is here to stay. In addition, our company uses a lot of Microsoft products, such as Office 365, Asp.net, etc, and since VSTS/TFS has proved itself invaluable to our own processes and is within the Microsoft family of products, we will continue to use VSTS/TFS for a long, long time.
JAMS is a critical resource free up people to do other things and ensuring that processes and tasks are run consistently. We are also confident that procedures are run consistently and on time or as soon as the necessary data is available. With automated job failure notification, we are not required to check that jobs are running correctly.
It's a great help to get more information about new feature release and stay updated on what the dev team is working on. I like how easy it is to just login and read through the work items. Each work item has basic details: Title, Description, Assigned to, State, Area (what it belongs to), and iteration (when it’s worked on). See image above.They move through different states (New → Discovery → Ready for Prod → etc.).
JAMS is very user friendly; you hardly need to do coding. The only thing that I would say a challenge is setting it up, but that's because you barely know the product yet and, in every processing, setting up is the difficult part. But once you've set it up and you are going to use it, you will really feel that it is worth to invest in this kind of software solution, it really does it job very well.
We didnt really encounter any downtime, no issues encountered during 2 years of use of JAMs also our client barely raise an issue with JAMS, mostly the issues is on the batch jobs that jams executes. So I would gave it a perfect 10, very reliable hardly encounters any error and bug
JAMS performance is very great, there are no issues raised with the performance, it just like nothing happens on the job after integration it gives you this monitoring capability, no reports and bugs raised on the performance, we didnt do integration with other software only database and with use of JAMS agent to different servers
When we've had issues, both Microsoft support and the user community have been very responsive. DevOps has an active developer community and frankly, you can find most of your questions already asked and answered there. Microsoft also does a better job than most software vendors I've worked with creating detailed and frequently updated documentation.
I've never had to wait more than a day for a response to any email queries submitted. We had a very positive experience using support hours during out migration process from v6 to v7. We've also recently had a weeklong group training course where all attendees were positive about the learning outcomes, a shoutout to Jose who did both the migration and the weeklong course!
People that were involved in the POC found the training a lot easier to follow. I think most people would have preferred to just get the training material and run through themselves.
I Was not part of the original Implementation, and the persons did that are no longer with the Organization. But I was part of the recent Upgrade process a year ago and I am the JAMS admin and was very pleased
Microsoft Planner is used by project managers and IT service managers across our organization for task tracking and running their team meetings. Azure DevOps works better than Planner for software development teams but might possibly be too complex for non-software teams or more business-focused projects. We also use ServiceNow for IT service management and this tool provides better analysis and tracking of IT incidents, as Azure DevOps is more suited to development and project work for dev teams.
JAMS is WAY more advanced, it isn't a fair comparison. The history is easy to get through. It is easy to get alerts of complete to failed and with a log. Adding jobs is extremely easy that even my teammates who do not manange the software are able to set them up. With the new web component we are very excited for the future of JAMS advancements.
The product is quite flexible. There are a number of features and functions that we use on a daily basis, and there are many features that are available that we have not yet needed or explored (like setting up jobs with the ability to do FTP or Sftp file transfers).
We have saved a ton of time not calculating metrics by hand.
We no longer spend time writing out cards during planning, it goes straight to the board.
We no longer track separate documents to track overall department goals. We were able to create customized icons at the department level that lets us track each team's progress against our dept goals.
Using JAMS when working from home (initially COVID, and now permanent) gives me tremendous visibility into the running operations of our business without any loss in productivity for not being in the office.
With JAMS I can more tightly schedule evening batch jobs by running one job after the successful completion of predecessor, as opposed to the CRON like guessing at safe start times.
Central control on a monitored server in a datacenter for all job scheduling tasks has given us 99.9% uptime reliability, instead of herding cats on multiple machines.
