Control-M from BMC is a platform for integrating, automating, and orchestrating application and data workflows in production across complex hybrid technology ecosystems. It provides deep operational capabilities, delivering speed, scale, security, and governance.
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ignio AIOps
Score 8.1 out of 10
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ignio AIOps, from Digitate in Santa Clara, is a solution designed to improve business agility by creating a unified view of the IT estate, connecting business functions to applications and infrastructure. This is combined with behavior profile of systems and applications that is continuously learnt using this blueprint. ignio aims to improve the transparency of complex Enterprise IT landscapes.
Control-M is a reliable and well-developed product with excellent vendor support that updates and expands the software often and offers a cloud-based deployment choice. When there are many Batch processes in IT operations that need to be monitored and controlled to ensure IT services, Control-M is ideally suited for centralized workload automation and task management.
It's good for issue resolution, user access request automation, standard report generation, health checks, executing self-healing as configured in the attributes. Currently not good at real-time monitoring to trigger an action. Health checks have to be on a scheduled basis.
Control-M provides a single, centralized interface for monitoring and managing all batch processes in the organization. Nothing is hidden or left unattended in a timely manner.
The proper use of the BIM component has allowed the change of paradigm in the operation, adopting a proactive management instead of the typical reactive management in the event of production failures.
The use of Forecast and production simulations allows you to identify bottlenecks and focus first on managing those failures that have the greatest impact on production SLAs.
Control-M/Change Manager has arrived to shorten development cycles from requirements gathering to production testing. It has been a utility that monetizes the development of Jobs meshes.
The GUI is capable of efficiently handling more than 80,000 jobs per day. This is certainly a challenge in designing a good user experience. I don't know if there is a reasonable limit to this. One of my clients runs more than 80,000 Jobs daily and the GUI remains smooth all the time.
Job-As-Code is a DevOps accelerator that has just begun to be adopted. Its implementation will make workload management even more cost-effective.
As with most of the mainframe software products, documentation seems to be the weak link for the products - written by people and for people who already know what they need to do, not for people who are trying to figure how to use the product.
We are a large JES3 mainframe shop. As with all vendors who still provide software for mainframe systems, software is generally designed and developed for JES2 and is frequently not fully tested in a JES3 environment before being shipped out.
There is a lot more the desktop tool can do. For example, we need to apply an upgrade to get the tool to talk to our infrastructure while employees are working from home. The tool was initially installed with the assumption that the desktops would be in UserLand. Instead after COVID-19 the desktop/laptops have been used for over a year on people's home networks. As of right now, we have to sync when the devices are connected to VPN. Moving forward with the upgrade, we will be getting this data over TLS when they are connected to the untrusted networks.
The concept of ignio AlOps requires OCM efforts within most operational teams. This isn't necessarily the fault of the tool itself, but when implementing ignio, or any AIOps tool, the team will get a lot of pushback as an outside team is centralizing the operational improvements. The tool should have a centralized intake process that will allow the collection, ranking, and management of automation opportunities. ignio AlOps should then simulate the proposed efficiencies from implementing something within the backlog. Right now a lot of local teams are having a hard time getting on the same page as the enterprise teams, and a common methodology for prioritizing (even if overly simplistic) would go a long way to enterprise planning.
These tools are very new and things get added to them all the time. There should be a way for the product's stakeholders and process owners to understand the additional value ignio AlOps is gaining over time.
It is a great product plain and simple. We've had Control-M for 20+ years and the support that BMC Software provides is really second to none. There is always a situation that someone can think of where I have to say, "No we can't do that", however I'm confident that we've been able to meet and most of the time exceed our end user expectations with what the product can offer them.
Control-M's overall usability is very good because it is simple to use. Control-M SelfService is an easy tool to give to some of the users who want to use a web interface. The training curve for most users is very short and most of the functions are very simple to figure out.
ignio AIOps version upgrades were a heavy lift. Having to learn a new language versus an industry standard language took time. More consideration on overall internal long-term support needs to be determined.
Although the product is very stable there have been a few incidents when I needed support. I have worked with technicians from all around the globe because of the rolling support. This gives me the quickest support when I need it most in those early hours of the morning. The technicians I have worked with have been very knowledgeable and if necessary got help when needed.
We have built a healthy relationship with the vendor support team throughout the implementation phase, all incidents raised were resolved within the SLA without a fail
I am happy with the way team has implemented and shared the product for our organization. However, would like to see it get extended to the other line of business too.
We last reviewed the market in 2001 (schedulers are long-term commitments!) and Control-M edged (by a very narrow margin) the Tivoli alternative, with Dollar Universe (now part of Automic) back in third place. We also tested the Tidal Software scheduler (now part of Cisco) but I cannot see that listed here. Control-M won out through reliability and cross-platform support. Since we made our choice it has become clear that Control-M has moved ahead of the alternatives.
I would expect this product to give a positive return on investment. Running jobs in cron for example would require a lot more scripting effort to ensure that the proper notifications are done on failures. With the built in functionality in Control-M the effort would be greatly reduced
