JAMS

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
JAMS
Score 8.1 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.N/A
Pricing
JAMS
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
JAMS
Free Trial
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
JAMS
Considered Both Products
JAMS
Chose JAMS
We use Kace also because it has an agent on every machine, so tasks that push out installations tend to go there. I'm not sure if Jams can do that, but if it does it's not clear that it does.
Chose JAMS
We switched from Automic Automation. JAMS is so much easier to implement, patch, upgrade, and push agents. It takes more steps to conduct activities in JAMS than in UC4.
Chose JAMS
I had evaluated 2 others in 2010/2011, but I do not remember their names. This was the easier one to work with and had a better looking, sometimes more professional looking UI than what I was evaluating. JAMS was more scaleable and had the ability to make custom interfaces to …
Chose JAMS
For us, JAMS has a great balance of price and functionality.
Chose JAMS
Mainly i've been using SQL Agent jobs in my career. JAMS takes scheduling a bit further. For instance, i would rather not have SQL Server run a job that is performing an SFTP step. Waste of resources and a job like that is well suited for JAMS
Chose JAMS
I might've used other scheduling mechanisms (such as in SQL Server), but JAMS, although with more 'moving pieces', is way more flexible.
Chose JAMS
JAMS is easier to use, provides more features and was easier to manage form a central location. simple features in JAMS were missing from VisualCron such as a projected daily schedule.
The install setup with a client and agents was better suited for us too
Chose JAMS
It's just different. The views are different, how you set it up is different. It's not good or bad, just different. I think JAMS offers more options when it comes to how jobs run. Like you can use sequence, or setup a job to run based on a number of different dependencies.
Chose JAMS
While VisualCron provided more guardrails and user centric GUI, JAMS had a better resiliency functions with their clustering and service polling and failovers. We tested this and were able to maintain a large library of jobs and data the seamlessly switches between data …
Chose JAMS
VisualCron was unreliable and buggy no matter what version we used, plus did not have DR functionality
Chose JAMS
As we grew dissatisfied and limited by Windows Task Scheduler, we selected JAMS because a senior Ops employee at the company had used it previously. We didn't do due diligence and run an RFP process against other providers at the time.
Chose JAMS
So much cheaper and has a much better ROI.
Chose JAMS
Tidal and Tivoli are great solutions for very large organizations with deep pockets. I have worked with them as an end-user but was not in a position to extend the platforms, so I can't speak to their capability to be extended with custom code as JAMS can with custom execution …
Chose JAMS
I took over JAMS administration and did not evaluate any other products.
Chose JAMS
JAMS is completely priced and is much easier to implement and configure. Like painting with a wide brush stroke the alerting and job actions are easy to apply. I have used other systems where each action required multiple configuration steps to stop the workflow when a job …
Features
JAMS
Workload Automation
Comparison of Workload Automation features of Product A and Product B
JAMS
7.8
37 Ratings
5% below category average
Multi-platform scheduling8.131 Ratings
Central monitoring8.035 Ratings
Logging7.735 Ratings
Alerts and notifications8.035 Ratings
Analysis and visualization7.333 Ratings
Application integration7.734 Ratings
Best Alternatives
JAMS
Small Businesses

No answers on this topic

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Score 8.6 out of 10
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Score 9.4 out of 10
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User Ratings
JAMS
Likelihood to Recommend
8.0
(37 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
7.7
(7 ratings)
Usability
6.9
(6 ratings)
Availability
8.2
(3 ratings)
Performance
8.2
(3 ratings)
Support Rating
8.2
(37 ratings)
Implementation Rating
7.7
(5 ratings)
Configurability
6.8
(2 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
7.3
(1 ratings)
Ease of integration
7.3
(1 ratings)
Product Scalability
8.0
(35 ratings)
Professional Services
8.2
(2 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
8.2
(2 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
8.2
(2 ratings)
User Testimonials
JAMS
Likelihood to Recommend
Fortra
JAMS is well suited for centralizing schedules. We have hundreds of databases, and JAMS has allowed us to centralize the scheduling of all of the individual jobs related to each individual database. This allows certain teams to follow the activity of specific jobs without having to access the individual servers on which the databases reside.
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Pros
Fortra
  • Watching for files
  • Running Power shell scripts
  • JOB notifications of failures to teams
  • Being able to interface / run other programs as either dos window, Power shell window, Python window through configurable execution methods
  • Purging JAMS history by Parameters, like dates and # of copies to keep of a job
  • Being able to configure a hot backup to take over in the event a Primary JAMS Server goes down, the backup automatically kicks in after 3 minutes. - High Availability mode
  • Being able to set up variables that can be used in JOBs / Sequences to hold login information (encrypted), date ranges or other Job Parameter values. And be able to programmatically updated by Power shell scripts to track progress between runs of the same job: count of orders processed, API Skip values when retrieving orders, when the API call only returns X amount per call and you need to get all available orders with multiple calls
  • JOB logs can be put anywhere on network for other users to access - IT allowing of course. With the high availability option, this is Great, since you don't have to check each of the JAMS Servers for a log when a fail over occures
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Cons
Fortra
  • Prior to JAMS I organized various batch job runs with a user friendly naming process (job, machine, date, etc). I had to jump through hoops to get JAMS to replicate by having a post-completion job rename and copy the log.
  • Natively support JAMS commands in Powershell7.
  • Failsafe guard to prevent runaway jobs that submit other JAMS jobs that were improperly coded. i.e. A throttle setting for new JOBS. I once had production go down when hundreds of jobs used up our daily license allocation in under a minute.
  • I have similar (but different) Execution Methods that would benefit from a shared template. Current setup is awkward to change.
  • I'd love my job Definitions to be natively linked to github for version control.
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Likelihood to Renew
Fortra
JAMS is an essential application within our organization. There is no chance that at any point in the foreseeable future we would migrate off of the platform or stop our maintenance contract. HelpSystems (now rebranded Forta) releases frequent updates which always add value to the product. The system's reliability and extensibility has earned our trust that it will scale with our organization.
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Usability
Fortra
At first its not 100% obvious what each item is meant for. When you look at the list for the first time there are a lot of objects, its taken some time to figure out what each one does. Once you figure out what each one does it makes more sense.
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Reliability and Availability
Fortra
JAMS has been super reliable in our implementation. The only reason it isn't a 10 is the web client isn't fully functional so the availability suffers very mildly there
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Performance
Fortra
JAMS performs well but the client some times take a little longer than normal to display logs and new views.
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Support Rating
Fortra
We had a very aggressive timeline to look for a new batch job processor that is compatible with our new server that could help us maintain and improve our current data processing procedure. The JAMS support team was there to address our inquiries promptly. On average, their response times have been within 24 hours, ensuring that we receive assistance when we need it
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Implementation Rating
Fortra
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
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Alternatives Considered
Fortra
JAMS is easier to use, provides more features and was easier to manage form a central location. simple features in JAMS were missing from VisualCron such as a projected daily schedule. The install setup with a client and agents was better suited for us too
Read full review
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
Fortra
i didnt have any involvement in the sales process, however we purchased the product so it had to be decent.
Read full review
Scalability
Fortra
I can only speak in in regards to scalability in the volume of jobs we have created. Many of our jobs exist in multiple environments, with each environment having its own unique folder names, connection strings, etc. We incorporate parameters on the folder level that contain the unique environment information. The jobs reference these values from the folder they are contained in, so we can easily copy a job from DEV to TEST and the source is the same but the values passed from the parameters are not. This makes it very easy to create many new jobs and copy them across multiple environments and have them work
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Professional Services
Fortra
i didnt have any involvement in the sales process, however we purchased the product so it had to be decent.
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Return on Investment
Fortra
  • JAMS was not the most cost-effective solution to the original program we were implementing at my Agency; but we were able to expand on the services we do provide using it's power and flexibility to enhance other program areas.
  • The cost-model from MVPSI has been great in allowing us to deploy a DEVELOPMENT, STAGING, then PRODUCTION scheduler integrating the platform into our SDLC.
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ScreenShots

JAMS Screenshots

Screenshot of Dashboard - Job HistoryScreenshot of Visual Job EditorScreenshot of Centralized Job RepositoryScreenshot of Job Monitor