Control-M review for various users and platforms
October 09, 2015
Control-M review for various users and platforms
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
7
Modules Used
- Desktop
- Scheduler
Overall Satisfaction with Control-M
Control-M is being used across the whole organization, both within the US and internationally for job automation. By going to one platform it has allowed us to be able to support and implement with a common language and time zone reference which makes after hours support much easier as users are in different time zones across the world.
- The scheduler interface is extremely user friendly, even for users that are not familiar with other job scheduling tools. We were able to implement Control-M and do cross-training for a number of departments. Users from other departments were able to quickly learn the tools and see if their jobs had completed successfully in order make troubleshooting their issues more efficient.
- The Gantt chart for when jobs are to run in the desktop is extremely helpful when planning for outages and downtime.
- Documentation from BMC is excellent.
- The reports seemed to be a bit clunky. I was never really able to build reports that pulled the data I was really looking for.
- For jobs that are set to run on demand or that are waiting for a resource always look like they're running in the Gantt charts. It would be beneficial if there was a way to differentiate those jobs from jobs that are actually running.
- We had issues more often that I'd have liked with not being able to see failure reasons. When looking at a failed job we would too often receive a message that the failure log could not be retrieved. This seemed to be a failure to write to the logs, not actually a failure to retrieve existing logs.
- Troubleshooting has improved with multiple groups as they are easily able to determine if data loss/job failure is the reason for a data issue.
- Conversion took significantly longer than was originally estimated by BMC so we had to run two platforms for almost 9 months. This definitely slowed down efficiency as many users did not know which tool to utilize for data load trouble shooting for close to a year.
- Being able to communicate with users across the globe in a universal language and time reference has vastly decreased data issues and greatly improved proficiency in getting new jobs implemented quickly and without problems.
We utilized Tivoli prior to moving to Control-M. The Control-M interface is significantly more user-friendly and easy to understand. Training was relatively quick for those that simply needed to learn how to log in and check job status. Getting to log files and failure reasons is a bit clunky and inconsistent, though. Having to drill into multiple places to see if a job failed due to connection issues or data issues could be a bit time consuming.