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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SolarWinds Network Device Monitor
Score 8.4 out of 10
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SolarWinds Network Device Monitor is a network diagnostic tool, from Austin-based SolarWinds.
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.
On its own, it's a solid choice for an SMB or Mid-size Enterprise if you're price sensitive and looking primarily for core functionality. SolarWinds has a large family of products that can also be leveraged in conjunction with SWNDM. Turning the product loose on a very large environment for discovery and mapping should be done with care and concern for a number of reasons but including the performance of the product for this task. If you're looking for an all-in-one product with some presumed supporting features built in (config manager, etc.) you'll need to look elsewhere.
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.
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.
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 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.
MS is meant for windows monitoring and up/down for mostly everything else. Moved away from MS System Center. Now we have better visibility and management can get reports. The other teams have added Linux to Solarwinds and also see improvements in monitoring. Whether you use snmp (v3), wmi or some other credentials to connect to you system, Solarwinds will more than likely be able to manage and monitor it.
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
