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ActiveBatch Workload Automation is a versatile software that allows businesses to streamline their operations by automating various tasks …
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What is ActiveBatch Workload Automation?
ActiveBatch from Advanced Systems Concepts in New Jersey is IT workload automation software.
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- Analysis and visualization (21)9.797%
- Logging (21)9.797%
- Alerts and notifications (22)9.696%
- Central monitoring (22)9.696%
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What is ActiveBatch Workload Automation?
ActiveBatch from Advanced Systems Concepts in New Jersey is IT workload automation software.
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What is ActiveBatch Workload Automation?
Advanced Systems Concepts, Inc. (ASCI) offers its Enterprise Job Scheduling and Workload Automation Solution, ActiveBatch.
ActiveBatch coordinates and consolidates silos of automation within a single framework. The goal is to give businesses the IT agility they need and reduce the time expended on managing and supporting multiple automation tools and silos. ActiveBatch provides users with advanced job scheduling and workload automation capabilities for reliable and adaptable integration with an array of applications, databases, platforms, and technologies. IT organizations can reduce their dependency on custom scripting with the ActiveBatch Integrated Jobs Library, which features hundreds of pre-built, proven, drag-and-drop integrations for commonly-scripted actions and functions in a multitude of different automation areas including workload, business and IT processes, managed file transfer, big data, and more.
ActiveBatch coordinates and consolidates silos of automation within a single framework. The goal is to give businesses the IT agility they need and reduce the time expended on managing and supporting multiple automation tools and silos. ActiveBatch provides users with advanced job scheduling and workload automation capabilities for reliable and adaptable integration with an array of applications, databases, platforms, and technologies. IT organizations can reduce their dependency on custom scripting with the ActiveBatch Integrated Jobs Library, which features hundreds of pre-built, proven, drag-and-drop integrations for commonly-scripted actions and functions in a multitude of different automation areas including workload, business and IT processes, managed file transfer, big data, and more.
ActiveBatch Workload Automation Features
Workload Automation Features
- Supported: Multi-platform scheduling
- Supported: Central monitoring
- Supported: Logging
- Supported: Alerts and notifications
- Supported: Analysis and visualization
- Supported: Application integration
ActiveBatch Workload Automation Videos
Find out how ActiveBatch can simplify your IT complexity with an industry leading job scheduling and workload automation solution!
Most organizations have between 3 and 8 different automation tools in place. This results in an increased cost of IT Operations, siloed processes...
Show More The pace of business is accelerating. Business teams need real-time information faster than ever before. ActiveBatch Self-Service Portal empowers business users to take on daily and ad hoc processes with a business user-friendly, web-based interface for desktop or tablet brows...
Show More IT and business processes are scattered across multiple environments, and the systems being managed have increased tenfold. How can you address this complexity in a world where IT budgets are static and finding people with the right skills is a growing problem? The answer is a...
Show More ActiveBatch Workload Automation Integrations
- Microsoft Azure
- Microsoft System Center
- SAP Crystal
- ServiceNow IT Service Management
- Informatica Intelligent Cloud Integration Services
- CyberArk Privileged Access Management
- Informatica PowerCenter
- Microsoft SharePoint
- Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations (formerly Dynamics AX)
- Amazon EC2
- Hadoop Ecosystem
- IBM Cognos BI
- IBM DataStage
- IBM PureData (Netezza)
- Microsoft Active Directory
- Microsoft Confiuration Manager
- Microsoft Exchange Server
- Microsoft Operations Manager
- Microsoft Orchestrator
- Microsoft Service Manager
- Microsoft Team Foundation Server
- Microsoft Virtual Machine Manager
- Oracle EBS
- Oracle Job Scheduling
- Oracle PeopleSoft
- PowerShell
- SAP BusinessObjects Data Services
- SAP NetWeaver
- SQL Server Scheduling
- Task Scheduler Automation
- Teradata
- VMware
ActiveBatch Workload Automation Technical Details
| Deployment Types | On-premise |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Windows, Linux, Mac, UNIX, Mac OS, IBM z/OS, Hyper-V, VMware, and more |
| Mobile Application | Apple iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Blackberry, Mobile Web |
ActiveBatch Workload Automation Downloadables
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ActiveBatch from Advanced Systems Concepts in New Jersey is IT workload automation software.
Reviewers rate Logging and Analysis and visualization highest, with a score of 9.7.
The most common users of ActiveBatch Workload Automation are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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ActiveBatch Workload Automation is a versatile software that allows businesses to streamline their operations by automating various tasks and workflows. Users have reported that the software is particularly useful in scheduling and automating jobs, eliminating the need for manual monitoring and saving time. With its options for triggers, ActiveBatch reduces the use of boilerplate code and automates actions based on events, making it efficient for running workflows, reports, analytics jobs, and data quality checks.
The software's ability to schedule data refreshes for testing purposes has been highly praised by users as it aids in development and testing priorities. ActiveBatch is also effective in planning daily activities such as managing purchase orders, tracking supplier activities, generating reports, and planning customer orders. Its good display, extensive options, and excellent user interface make it easy for users to perform various activities.
Furthermore, ActiveBatch serves as a centralized platform for managing and automating IT activities like work scheduling, data processing, file transfers, and application integration. It has been successfully utilized across various sectors including IT, manufacturing, healthcare, finance, and banking. By automating complex workflows and business processes, ActiveBatch increases productivity while reducing errors and improving overall efficiency.
Users appreciate the software's flexibility in automating redundant tasks within multiple departments. It has helped organizations set standards, improve security measures, and provide web-based access to end-users. With its powerful scheduling and workflow automation abilities, ActiveBatch has proven to be an invaluable tool for streamlining more complex processes.
Overall, ActiveBatch Workload Automation offers a wide range of use cases across industries, addressing different business problems efficiently with minimal human intervention.
Automatic job scheduling functionality: Users highly appreciate ActiveBatch's automatic job scheduling functionality, as it eliminates the need for manual intervention and ensures that tasks are executed at the desired time. Several reviewers have mentioned that this feature has significantly improved their productivity by reducing the amount of time spent on managing schedules.
Streamlining of workflows: Many users have praised ActiveBatch for its ability to streamline workflows. They find it easy to design and modify processes using the graphical workflow builder, which allows them to visually construct and modify workflows by simply dragging and dropping elements. This feature has been particularly helpful in optimizing resource allocation and minimizing conflicts or bottlenecks in job execution.
Cross-platform compatibility: The cross-platform compatibility of ActiveBatch is highly valued by users who work with multiple systems and applications. They appreciate that the software supports various platforms, enabling seamless automation and management of processes across different environments. This flexibility has been mentioned as a key strength by several reviewers, allowing them to automate complex workflows involving various platforms without any issues.
Triggers Fail: Some users have reported that triggers sometimes fail, causing significant issues in their workflows. These failures can disrupt the automation process and hinder smooth operations, leading to delays or errors in task execution.
Lack of Proper Documentation: A common complaint from reviewers is the lack of proper documentation for new features. Users have expressed the need for more detailed and comprehensive documentation to understand and effectively utilize these features. The absence of clear instructions often results in confusion and difficulty when trying to implement new functionalities.
Confusing User Interface: Several users find the user interface to be confusing and overwhelming, especially for novice users. They believe that simplifying the interface would greatly enhance navigation and improve overall user experience. The complex layout, hidden menus, and multiple clicks required to access certain functions make it challenging to manage jobs and configure processes efficiently.
Users recommend the following for ActiveBatch: Take advantage of the training and support provided by following the academy videos and completing the ActiveBatch boot camp. Seek advice from senior engineers and find a community of users for support. Plan properly before setting up ActiveBatch and ensure you have a good Customer Support representative. Start small with ActiveBatch and gradually expand its use. Design jobs/plans properly to maximize the benefits of the tool. Consider the complexity of automation when choosing ActiveBatch and utilize AB Professional services for software configuration. Review 3rd party integration capabilities in advance and ensure compatibility with existing systems and processes. Use ActiveBatch to reduce manual intervention and automate operational necessities, such as generating and sending data files to vendor solutions.
Overall, users believe that ActiveBatch is a robust tool for IT scheduling needs, offering a wide range of features and excellent support. They emphasize the importance of training, planning, community support, gradual expansion, integration considerations, and automation efficiency when using ActiveBatch.
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Use of ActiveBatch Workload Automation software has significantly reduced the time my team and I spend on various repetitive tasks like running DB jobs and reducing load on DB servers.
By streamlining complex workflows, it has not only saved manual efforts but also provided accurate results. The number of manual hours has been reduced from ~20 Hours to ~5 Hours
The software is flexible in integration with various other applications and services.
With its powerful scheduling and workflow automation abilities the tool offers us various options to streamline more complex processes.
The software is altogether a most powerful, robust and efficient in the industry with minimal human intervention requirement and high accuracy (minimal errors)
By streamlining complex workflows, it has not only saved manual efforts but also provided accurate results. The number of manual hours has been reduced from ~20 Hours to ~5 Hours
The software is flexible in integration with various other applications and services.
With its powerful scheduling and workflow automation abilities the tool offers us various options to streamline more complex processes.
The software is altogether a most powerful, robust and efficient in the industry with minimal human intervention requirement and high accuracy (minimal errors)
- Regular scan of endpoint security components
- Scheduling Jobs and managing workflow
- Transfer data between services (AWS)
- Streamlining workflow, eliminating repetitive tasks
- Improvement in Permission model
- Trigger Option needs to be enhanced.
- not at affordable price for smaller corporates
- GUI can be improved
August 06, 2023
Scheduling Made Easier
Job Scheduling was something which used to take alot of time and also need an resource everytime to monitor them with the help of ActiveBatch Workload Automation we can schedule the jobs automatically to a particular time and we do not require any resource to run them. Active Batch also restarts itself when there is failure of jobs. Alerting, Monitoring has also become easy with ActiveBatch. it also provides the option of triggers we can eliminate or reduce the use of Boiler Plate code and we can automate triggers based on event/action. This was helping me alot.
- Automatic Job Scheduling
- jobs functioning automatically with the help off triggers.
- Streamlining entire Workflow
- Triggers fails at times causes a lot of trouble it has to looked
- Proper Documentation of new features is required
- UI should be Simplified
ActiveBatch Workload Automation is software used in day-to-day activities to automate and manage IT processes across multiple platforms, applications, and technologies. It acts as a centralized platform for monitoring, scheduling, and controlling workflows, jobs, tasks like work scheduling, data processing, file transfers much more. Scheduling jobs and monitoring resources was a complex type where in ActiveBatch helps us to resolve such complexity by scheduling jobs and restarting itself when there is a failure of jobs. Alerting, Monitoring has also become easy with ActiveBatch.It also provides the option of triggers we can eliminate errors and we can automate triggers based on events/actions which helped in day-day activities.
- Automatic scheduling and monitoring
- Streamlining entire Workflow
- Highly secure
- Improving the UI
- Supporting multiple cloud platforms (AWS, Azure)
- Improved Reporting and Analytics
Active batch is very useful in planning your daily activities, providing the purchase order for raw materials, track the activities from supplier side, easily generate the reports as required and plan for customer orders.
Other features are good display, has enormous options to work, user interface is excellent, can do almost all activities
Other features are good display, has enormous options to work, user interface is excellent, can do almost all activities
- Excellent Business development software
- Very good in planning customer orders
- Very good software for all kind of tracking
- Some customization features to be provided so that we can tweak a software a bit
- Regular training to be provided
- for new user it is bit difficult to adjust
By automating processes, managing resources, and delivering real-time visibility and control, ActiveBatch is a flexible and strong task automation tool that assists enterprises in addressing a wide range of business problems. Businesses may orchestrate complicated workflows across numerous systems and apps using ActiveBatch. This increases organisation productivity by ensuring that tasks are completed in the proper sequence and that dependencies are efficiently managed. The scope of use case is also very satisfactory. ActiveBatch can automate data processing and extract, transform, and load(ETL) processes, ensuring that data is processed accurately and efficiently.
- ActiveBatch allows businesses to orchestrate complex workflows across multiple systems and applications, ensuring that tasks are completed in correct order and on time.
- Businesses can monitor and manage activities and workflows more effectively with ActiveBatch's real-time visibility into their status.
- Workflows are automated using ActiveBatch, which cuts down on time spent on completing activities and eliminates the need for manual involvement.
- Although ActiveBatch comes with some fundamental cloud management features, I believe that this area might be strengthened to enable multi-cloud settings and optimise the use of cloud resources.
- Integration with third-party tools and systems can be enhanced.
- The documentation of the software can be more clear to helps users understand the features and customisation options.
ActiveBatch Workload Automation may be employed in a wide range of sectors and applications, including banking, healthcare, manufacturing, and information technology operations. It may be used to plan and make payments, track account balances, and produce audit and compliance reports. It is also useful for optimizing production lines, managing inventory levels, and coordinating shipping and logistics. The particular use cases for ActiveBatch will be determined by each organization's needs and requirements.
- It offers graphical workflow builder that allows you to construct and change processes by dragging and dropping elements and utilizing predefined templates.
- It offers intelligent queuing system that optimizes resource allocation and load balancing based on priority, availability, and dependencies.
- It offers robust alerting and notification system that notifies you of any difficulties or failures in processes and offers remedy choices.
- The user interface might be more straightforward and user-friendly, particularly for inexperienced or new users. Some functions are hidden behind menus or need many clicks to reach. More customization options, such as themes, layouts, and shortcuts, might further help the interface.
- Integration with other programmes and systems might be smoother and more comprehensive. Manual configuration or scripting is required for some integrations, which can be time-consuming and error-prone. Some integrations, such as cloud services, databases, or online services, are also limited in functionality or compatibility.
- To handle larger and more complicated workloads, performance and scalability could be increased. When working with large amounts of data or tasks, some users have encountered delayed loading times, crashes, or freezes. More optimisation options, such as load balancing, caching, or parallel processing, might potentially help the system.
April 12, 2023
Simply Automation! smart and efficient
ActiveBatch Workload Automation is used for multiple purposes such as SAP jobs, File transfer systems (FTP), and data warehouse loads. There are numerous functionalities the supports various types of workflows, including batch calls and service calls. The format of job scheduling is well organized and very similar to what we use in day-to-day life making it easier to use. It is able to control all the jobs (FTP, data warehouse) for multiple environments over and across different servers.
- It has a low code WLA solution that supports way of approching to IT automation
- Highly efficient across the technologies and organization
- file transfer triggers and message transfer triggers are added advantages for powerful scheduling jobs
- support for some of the bugs can be improved
- sometimes its hard of set the permissions
Active Batch handles all of our nightly batch jobs including but not limited to file transfers between SFTP sites, SSRS report generation, file encryption/decryption and much more. We have several use cases for using Active Batch but one of the main drivers was having a solution to house all of our Windows Task Scheduler jobs, while task scheduler is great, it was a pain to manage and support. With Active Batch, we now have a single solution where we can see which jobs are running, how long they are running for, if they failed, and when they would run next, etc. We currently have about 1000 jobs in different Active Batch environments.
- Alerts on job conditions such as failed, long running, or aborted.
- Allows easy organization by associating jobs with objects and containing them within folders and/or plans.
- Treats all items as an object which allows for continuous reuse of common items such as schedules and account credentials.
- Sometimes execution agents can crash under heavy job load.
- Execution agents do not auto update on their own.
- Event based triggers are not 100% reliable.
ActiveBatch Workload Automation runs all of our nightly processes, creates server reports, verifies services are up and restarts them if not. Monitors mission critical servers and SAN units for space issues, encrypts and FTP's files to clients, sends out strategic notifications to clients and monitors SLA's. We use ActiveBatch Workload Automation for almost everything we do. It's an incredible piece of software.
- ActiveBatch Workload Automation executes our nightly processes and then monitors every process through all of the stages then notifies the client sending them technical information about the job run.
- ActiveBatch Workload Automation monitors our SAN and mission critical servers for space issues. When we get an alert from ActiveBatch Workload Automation we know it's legitimate.
- ActiveBatch Workload Automation logs everything! If a job fails we know that we will have all the information we will need to troubleshoot the issue.
- We have some jobs with 100's of steps and it doesn't even phase our Job Scheduler. It is an amazing application.
- There could be a more robust user community to share idea's. There is one but I think it could be much better.
- It's a very complicated application so it's not super easy to pick right up and start using it. We made some mistakes in the beginning that we feel we should have had a better understanding before we started using it. That's our fault.
May 13, 2021
A Very Satisfied Customer/User of ActiveBatch
We use ActiveBatch to run our DW Informatica workflows, daily tableau reports, analytics jobs, and ICEDQ rules. This allows us to minimize downtime/errors when coordinating data loads, reporting, data quality, and analysis jobs. We can also easily scheduled prod to test data refreshes which helps our team and others with development and testing priorities.
- Makes scheduling easy to understand, follow, and rerun jobs when necessary.
- Allows for cross-team coordination of scheduled tasks which reduces errors.
- Makes stopping jobs easy when needed for server/database downtime.
- Scripting enables us to easily change email addresses for failed job alerts.
- Nested plans/jobs make creating and changing dependencies simple.
- On RARE occasions, have seen scheduling properties changed that don't take effect.
- Simpler to understand/more robust reporting options would be nice to have.
- Maybe I'm missing something, but why doesn't the Instances view show completion time? Just execution time and duration.
February 10, 2021
ActiveBatch - the only Automation tool you'll ever need
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
ActiveBatch [Workload Automation] is used by our department to fulfill company wide needs. The main use is to control and monitor overnight processing to ensure that all processes are run successfully without need of manual intervention. We also use ActiveBatch [Workload Automation] for internal system maintenance tasks and any other processes that originally required frequent, repetitive manual intervention.
- ActiveBatch [Workload Automation] is great for simplifying complex tasks so that users of multiple technical skill levels can create and monitor automated tasks.
- The support team is amazing and will respond with solutions and answers to questions or issues very quickly.
- ActiveBatch [Workload Automation] does a great job of adding new features and enhancements to the product based on customer feedback.
- ActiveBatch [Workload Automation] can be a little overwhelming for new users due to its many features and options.
We used ActiveBatch to manage many of our automated database reports. It was used system-wide, but for our department only my colleague and I used it. It was supposed to be a replacement for Windows task scheduler, but it barely worked as intended. We had to hack many of our scheduled jobs to use batch scripts since the built-in Powershell or command line options did not work.
- Everything in one place
- Easily manage multiple machines and their scripts
- Supposed to allow for more in-depth schedule 'chaining', e.g. when this job ends it kicks off another
- Almost none of the advertised functionality worked in any form
- Hacks to get it to work included calling a batch script via a scheduled task instead of just saving the code directly in AB - running that way did nothing
- Notifications of job activity either didn't work or just absolutely spammed you
- User accounts didn't work, our team had to share the one that barely worked
We are using ActiveBatch across multiple departments. Our collections team is using it to gather customer payment history from a Microsoft SQL database. Our billing application runs through ActiveBatch and feeds the billing data to the data warehouse. Through ActiveBatch, our business unit's reports are made available, or they receive ActiveBatch alerts indicating an error occurred in the data generation and details about the error.
- ActiveBatch does Microsoft SQL jobs well, providing centralized configurations.
- The scheduling options and flexibility is very good in ActiveBatch.
- The ability to restrict ActiveBatch users to specific areas of the application is easy to manage.
- The Oracle connectivity and error detection is challenging and doesn't always work for us.
- The UI for administration is overwhelming as first and could be simplified.
November 06, 2015
ETL processing you can set up once and forget about
It was and still is being managed and integrated into other internal systems by the whole IT DevOps team, but forms a critical layer that services our entire organization in providing automated linkage between my former company's systems and those of their clients. On any given week the company would have literally hundreds of file import/export transactions that need to happen on a single day, every day, every month, or some complex combination of days at different hours of the day and night and consistently ActiveBatch delivered. It allowed for the efficient design and redesign of import/export jobs (such as being able to reuse schedule objects, allow for the partial execution of nodes for a particular job to help with testing, and effortlessly change parameters from testing to development deployments), logging of transaction errors, and ability to work with the wide variety of file processing tools that we would use internally (ETL, SSIS packages, .NET code, etc.) It's relatively intuitive design allows for it to be used and managed by people with even a bare minimum of IT experience, without sacrificing power and reliability.
- One good feature I already mentioned is that once you create a configuration object (such as a schedule object), you can reuse it as much as needed. This minimizes errors in scheduling because there's less opportunity to make a configuration error with future similar jobs that would follow the same schedule, makes it more efficient to schedule those new jobs, and makes it efficient to make scheduling changes--change the scheduling object once and all the related jobs' schedules are automatically changed.
- Partial path execution is a good strength, especially for testing/debugging. I can have a decently sized tree of process nodes for a given job, but I can easily deactivate the nodes I do not want to include in my testing.
- Being able to define test and production jobs in separate environments and easily change the settings of one without affecting the other is another strength. Often I would have a job set up in a test environment and after testing it, it would get ported to a very similar production environment with only having to change 3-4 parameter settings. And then I could easily deactivate the test job while still keeping it all set up in the event of needing it for future enhancement/troubleshooting.
- While I like being able to reuse scheduling objects and the like, more work needs to be done to help one not reinvent the same scheduling object without realizing it and to then find scheduling objects that have similar schedules even if they are worded slightly differently than what I'm expecting. It needs to be "smarter". It was easy to accumulate a pool of scheduling objects that while named differently, had exactly the same schedule. It was also hard to sift through to find the little differences between similarly named scheduling objects.
- The logger had a clean enough interface but it could be more legible and offer contextual help to describe the messages one is reading. I remember trying to read black text on a medium gray background with Courier size 10-11 font. Not so easy to read quickly and to parse through the relevant parts. I think some selective color coding would be good and links to message definitions or any form of further information would be nice. Maybe the ability to export the log file to various formats would also be helpful.
- I don't remember a dashboard that at a glance on the top level would highlight what jobs failed completely and which jobs might have warnings or non-critical errors. I got emails because I defined to get them. Maybe again if there was a way to color-code the type of error would be good nice-to-have.
November 03, 2015
A Great Solution For Automation
ActiveBatch usage in the company has expended extensively from its v4 days when it hosted just 6 jobs. Now, with over two thousand jobs and dozens of workflows, it touches and does processes for just about every department within the company; claims, sales, I.T., finance, H.R., and now the mainframe. It allowed us to set standards for how users write jobs and security of the systems. With the addition of the web server component, end-users can access the system via the web GUI instead of providing them server console access. In training the users, we set forth policies for how to write/use code/elements of the system so that others, not familiar with the system, can quickly identify where issues are and target their efforts in those jobs. After our security audit, use of the ActiveBatch increased since it hooks into our encryption software....well, it hooks into a lot of applications specific to our needs. With any workflow, comes a different set of requirements, and ActiveBatch has allowed us to meet or exceed every one of them.
- Interaction with other third party software. Interacts with encryption software, various 'partner designated' sftp software, file manipulation software, etc.
- Variety of options for users based on experience in accomplishing the same things as 'coders'. Someone like me wouldn't need to use the Jobs Library too much but users who are not comfortable with code can accomplish the same tasks using the drag/drop functionality of the pre-built jobs library.
- Security. Allows the admins to secure every single element of the system; plans, jobs, accounts, etc.
- Easy to use by the end-users.
- Lack of continued development for the non-jobs step library items.
- Updates sometimes 'break' previously working functionality; the email trigger comes to mind.
- Lack of development of what can trigger jobs/processes.