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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
Frequently Asked Questions
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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Reviews
(1-5 of 5)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
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.
- Object reuse design.
- Alerts and notifications.
- Job variety - you can run processes, scripts, or use the native jobs library builder.
100%
10.0
- We used to have manual processes that took hours each month, now it runs in Active Batch, allowing our teams to focus on higher-priority items.
- The annual cost of Active Batch as a solution is fairly high.
I have used other products but I do not have the level of experience with them as I do Active Batch.
March 30, 2022
ActiveBatch Workload Automation Reduces Scheduling Time
We use ActiveBatch Workload Automation for our IT processes and systems. Before we needed to make different complex scripts, eg powershell. Now thanks to ActiveBatch Workload Automation it is centralized in one software application.
- schedule jobs
- consolidation of the different object and processes
- expand the base line of the different jobs
- still need some scripting code
- some objects could be better intuitive
- learning scale
- scheduling Jobs
- make it easy to expand the UI
- The number of predefined objects
71.66666666666667%
7.2
- make a directly visible if something went wrong
- not to worry when execute scheduled jobs
- negative point is that only large businesses can benefits, I believe.
I only have used this software, so I can't judge other software. I wasn't involved in decision making.
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.
- Logging was one of the biggest reasons that we went with ActiveBatch Workload Automation.
- Ability to restart a job at the point of failure was another reason.
- ActiveBatch Workload Automation is stellar at Notification and monitoring features! It's amazing what you can do inside each job once you understand the genius of it.
100%
10.0
- ActiveBatch Workload Automation transformed our company! I always tell our directors please sell more we have the tool to handle it.
- Our business objective was to give our clients a solid successful experience and ActiveBatch Workload Automation has exceeded our expectations by a long shot! It delivers day in and day out for us!
- When we purchased ActiveBatch Workload Automation our clients were on the verge of leaving us. We had daily SLA violations that cost us dearly. ActiveBatch Workload Automation rescued us!
We looked at several other workload automation solutions and hands down we all looked at each other after seeing the demo and we all understood the genius of the application. To be honest we were all stunned and talked about it for weeks afterward. It didn't even compare to the other platforms we had demos of. We knew instinctively that this was the one.
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.
- Scheduling Informatica PowerCenter workflows.
- Ability to trigger dependent jobs easily.
- Using the Stop/start queues options for maintenance outages of our databases.
96.66666666666666%
9.7
- We have saved time of our development teams when implementing new jobs.
- Eliminated errors when report jobs would start before data loads.
I was not involved in the evaluation/purchase decision of ActiveBatch as that decision was made at our VP level. So I cannot comment on other product comparison.
- Adding/updating plans and jobs is very quick and easy to do.
- Stopping/restarting queues for planned technical outages.
- Setting and tracking SLA successes/misses.
- The reporting function is somewhat limited.
Yes, but I don't use it
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
ActiveBatch [Workload Automation] jobs are developed by two departments, but those jobs are for (or affect) many departments across the whole organization.
We are consistently looking for repetitive tasks that are currently taking up employees time, but which can be automated. By building automation scripts, significant time savings are achieved, and employees are freed to work on tasks which are not repetitive - and thus scriptable.
ActiveBatch has been an excellent tool for this type of automation, as the job scripts are easy to develop quickly, and logging and alerting are strongly incorporated for when things don't go as expected.
We are consistently looking for repetitive tasks that are currently taking up employees time, but which can be automated. By building automation scripts, significant time savings are achieved, and employees are freed to work on tasks which are not repetitive - and thus scriptable.
ActiveBatch has been an excellent tool for this type of automation, as the job scripts are easy to develop quickly, and logging and alerting are strongly incorporated for when things don't go as expected.
- File management - moving, archiving, and folder cleanup are a drag-and-drop breeze. The visual representation of file management steps includes date/time filtering, file/folder/both specification, and recursion all in an easy and intuitive unit.
- FTP/SFTP/FTPS - while one must still write the FTP scripts, the interface simplifies much of the infrastructure, allowing the developer to encapsulate the script text in a graphical package that is easy and intuitive.
- PowerShell integration - for anything that isn't easy in ActiveBatch's GUI, simply drop in a PowerShell step and write the task in PoSh - anything returned from PoSh can then be used by the following steps.
- String handling / parsing. I find myself using PowerShell to do a fair amount of text parsing (particularly if manipulations are needed) - not necessarily a bad thing, but certainly a place where ActiveBatch could be improved.
- Debugging - or lack of it! With no stepping debugger, it can be a longer process than many other programming / scripting environments: rather than simply stepping through and observing state changes, I find myself inserting logging steps to excess, then having to clean them up once the error is found.
- The perennial - Documentation! While a near-universal complaint for *any* software, ActiveBatch's developer documentation is somewhat spotty - just where I need detail, I find summary-level info. There is lots of documentation (as there should be for a tool with such a wide range of applications), but it is in mixed formats (some PDF, some CHM), and the descriptions of specific fields within job steps is often little more than I can get in a tool-tip in the GUI. Allowable ranges, expected formats for string data, and similar helpful details are inconsistent.
- The KnowledgeBase at ASCI's web site often has examples which answer the questions I have, but not always - and not always under the search terms one would think to use.
- By far, the man-hours saved are the most important factor - and some of that is below the surface - while things like FTP files just being available rather than someone having to manually retrieve the file, or simple cleanup preventing overloading a server's drive space with multiplying temp files - this is the underlying benefit to all other benefits.
- Ease of Use: most jobs can be developed within a few hours - or perhaps a day or two. To write an equivalent job in something like C# or Java would take much longer, and would likely be less flexible. Maintaining jobs once developed is similarly easy.
- Unattended Scheduling - because tasks can be run as a specific user, and scheduled at any appropriate time, disruptive tasks can be scheduled and run in a way that minimizes disruption: files which must be opened exclusively can be processed well before users would normally be on the clock, resource-intense SQL jobs can be run at times of minimum impact, etc.
63.33333333333333%
6.3
- I have not run numbers to determine hard impact, but a quick estimate is that at least one job is running for a average of about 6 hours per day - that 6 hours, if done by hand, would equate to about 30 - 40 hours per day (and in some cases, could not be duplicated manually, as the job repeats faster than a person could accomplish one cycle.)
During initial selection, we compared ActiveBatch with simple schedulers like Task Manager and cron, as well as VisualCron and JAMS. ActiveBatch had the widest range of triggers and the best scheduler/calendar system, and the most comprehensive list of easily-available actions.
We also were invited to use ASCI's normal tech support during a trial period - and having done a fair bit of tech support myself, I was very impressed! It was quick and easy to talk to an actual tech (minimal voice menu), and my questions were answered quickly and accurately, with a friendly tech who didn't sound as if I were an interruption to their game of solitaire (like I've gotten from plenty of other vendors). No other vendor we looked at invited us to evaluate their tech support so directly.
We also were invited to use ASCI's normal tech support during a trial period - and having done a fair bit of tech support myself, I was very impressed! It was quick and easy to talk to an actual tech (minimal voice menu), and my questions were answered quickly and accurately, with a friendly tech who didn't sound as if I were an interruption to their game of solitaire (like I've gotten from plenty of other vendors). No other vendor we looked at invited us to evaluate their tech support so directly.