Control-M Review
Overall Satisfaction with Control-M
Control-M is used to schedule thousands of jobs each day for our core banking products in one of our strategic data centers. This consists of both mainframe and open systems. The mainframe environment consists of 4 major sysplex environments that support both production and test work. The open system runs over 2000 agents across a variety of operating systems.
Pros
- Control-M provides the functionality required to run a lot of jobs in a short period of time. There are times when more than a thousand jobs are pushed through the system in a very short timeframe and Control-M is able to manage this workload with no problem.
- The GUI interface used for monitoring and interacting with Control-M also is a big advantage when processing so many events. This provides real-time viewing and allows for quick responses from our technicians to act and recover issues. This is very important to our business that requires very little down time without major impact to our customers.
- The history information Control-M captures and saves has been a big advantage when researching issues. This information is also used for quality control when making changes as well as satisfying audit requirements. This data is also used to manage capacity and performance of Control-M which has a long history of stability. This is important for many reasons but the number one reason for FIS would be the success it brings to our business and our customers' business.
Cons
- A key scheduling function that was omitted from Control-M is dataset triggering. BMC included this function as part of Control-O which requires a separate product to manage dataset triggering.
- Control-M product release upgrades are very complex and requires extensive knowledge for Control-M and the OS environment.
- Because Control-M is used for the majority of the mainframe processing Control-M has a bigger advantage over other tools that provide the same functionality. So the ROI would lean more to Control-M for customer and business success.
We still use them all depending on which datacenter you refer to. Little Rock is primarily an ASG (ZEKE) user but we also support CA (CA7). New Berlin used CA (ESP) but is in the process of converting over to Control-M as the data center is consolidated into the Milwaukee data center.
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