Tidal by Redwood Review
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Automation of scheduled tasks...all across the board. Database operations, Monitoring operations, Managed File Transfer, DevOps. I manage it as an enterprise-wide solution with my present position and all previous positions. We automate Linux, Windows, AIX, SFTP, MSSQL, Oracle, MySQL, MariaDB, DB2, RESTApi, Email, Informatica and Service Now assets.
Pros
- Allows for development of complex workflows with little scripting knowledge required.
- Built in High-Availabity and redundancy
- Robust client interface
- Excellent audit logging which satisfies regulatory audits
- Granular permissioning providing varying levels of access to different groups
- SEV1 issues are addressed as top priority and you will not be left alone in system-down situations until you are up and running.
Cons
- Redwood is purposefully killing the Tidal product by price gauging customers on renewals. Three to Four times increase for licensing renewals.
- Tier one support seems to have no history with the product, no knowledge of automation, and asks for unnecessary volumes of information before escalating to the REAL Tidal support team. It often takes several days before someone who actually supports Tidal sees the ticket.
- Since the acquisition, support quality has taken a nose-dive for non-critical issues. Resolution times take weeks, months, if at all. Before Redwood acquired it, resolution times took hours or days.
- Tidal (before Redwood's acquisition) has a long history of using the customers as Beta testers. New versions are released without having gone through adequate testing on systems of scale.
- This vendor forces customers to update to newest release rather than fixing bugs identified in versions which never went through and adequate QA process.
Likelihood to Recommend
Well suited: Tidal by Redwood is well-liked for automating Database / Data Warehouse operations, ETL operations, Managed File Transfers. Tidal by Redwood does a good job being a framework to link programmatic - disparate systems within the same organizations (i.e., involving Linux, Windows, database, REST API calls, moving files around via SFTP in the same workflow) In large enterprises with thousands of jobs and workflows, Tidal by Redwood user interface is very powerful and can be used to quickly find relevant objects (filtering with several sort options). Tidal by Redwood API is very useful for "automating the automation tool", a term I use to describe automating a large number of job edits, inserts, modifications. It has a clever interface that allows you prepared XML code via a web interface, negating the need to solely submit posts via script. Less appropriate: In years past, the product was often usable by management and less-technical staff. Over the course of the years it has become more complex, adding new features and capabilities. This has been a blessing and also a curse. Now I find the learning curve too steep for casual users to invest the time learning it. Promoting jobs between environments is byzantine. The legacy application for this (Transporter) is slow to load in my experience. The new application (Repository) is now on the 6th version and in my opinion feels like the UI was designed by a programmer and tested with very small environments. In my opinion, it is not intuitive, and still considered not ready for use by the majority of the user community. Job versioning is still in its infancy.
