Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review Turbonomic helps us see what uses resources and what needs more and how to reorganize to maximize hardware use. I think companies with multiple VMware clusters would benefit from this software. Perhaps not if the company is small. However, Turbo Operations Manager is best for virtualizing data-intensive platforms like SQL.
Read full review Pros 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. Read full review Presentation is nice. Its easy to understand what your looking at and the data that is being presented to you. Properly identify resource utilization and recommendations for action on how VMs can be improved and resources can be better utilized. It was also able to tell us the same information and analysis for cloud resources. I was not expecting that. Read full review Cons 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. Read full review It would be nice if the UI included a break-down of features that are both licensed as well as un-licensed. That way, you could not only see what you have, but what you don't. The right-sizing recommendations are great, but very little info is given about why the recommendation is being made. More info would not only increase understanding, but would also help drive decision-making. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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.
Read full review We are certainly happy with Turbonomic as a whole and have invested quite a bit of time and effort into learning the ins and outs of the product. We have our reporting setup the way we want it and have gained definite value from these features. I will say though that many products nowadays are offering more native monitoring, reporting, and alerting features which may eventually steer us away from this product
Read full review Usability 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.
Read full review Excellent approach to larger VM organizational management. They have an very clean integrated dashboard that allows us to see everything in our environment and what that is doing in real-time. It works on multiple hyper-visors really well and integrates capacity planning on my local site as well as my cloud locations.
Read full review Reliability and Availability We've had issues with a server crashing. The latest issue has the option for high availability which should help with that.
Read full review VMTurbo has not caused any outages by not doing what we expect it to do.
Read full review Performance I've never seen a performance issue with Control-M.
Read full review It allocates resources among applications by showing more on the cost breakdown by cloud service, with metrics on cloud provider information like Azure Management, Identity, Networking, Storage with costs per day, and total services costs. This then could facilitate and show the corresponding actions thereafter upon scaling.
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review When I contact support I get a quick response and they are able to solve my problem quickly. I also get a sense that they want to make sure that we are getting value from the product and walk me through whatever steps are needed to accomplish my goals.
Read full review In-Person Training Alex (from VMTurbo) has worked with the product for years and helped develop the product. He was very knowledgeable and was able to provide our support team with details knowledge on how to get our deployment configured correctly as well as help with another VMTurbo POC within another customers environment.
Read full review Online Training After buying VMTurbo Operations Manager, I was invited to an online user training event. I felt this training was effective and dug just deep enough to be informative yet still keep my attention. Additionally, the webinar was free.
Read full review Implementation Rating It is a good approach to define a distributed architecture when you have multiple control-m servers.
Read full review The implementation was very simple. Just upload an OVA file and power on the VM. Once it comes up enter some networking information and you can then access the web interface. From there, just begin configuring the system for your environment by adding you license and the various virtual environments and storage through the inventory tab
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review As the organization had experience of years in using IBM products, we had the confidence that they will provide us with great support. And we needed a reliable solution as a financial institute to ensure continuous operations. Even though the price was very high, we made the correct decision to go ahead with IBM Turbonomic as the feedback from existing users in the region was very positive. We needed a solution which was capable of handling our automation requirements. All these were green in IBM Turbonomic.
Read full review Scalability Control-M doesn't really use that many resources
Read full review easy scalable, adding new clusters in, no big deal.
Read full review Professional Services Professional services were always there to guide us in our transformation to the cloud. They understood our business model and then were able to provide guidance on what we needed from the tool.
Read full review Return on Investment 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 Read full review Application performance has been a big one. With Turbonomic keeping everything running at top performance, it can make changes when extra resources are need, quicker than somebody being notified and then making the necessary changes. Turbonomic has been a great cost savings for us on multiple occasions. We use it every time we are improving servers. With the planning feature we get the best performance form new hardware purchases Read full review ScreenShots IBM Turbonomic Screenshots