Item: JAMS
Rating: 9
Author: William Madley

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our firm utilizes JAMS to automate multiple business critical processes as well as improve QoL on information gathering and supplemental needs within our own team, department, as well as other departments. For example workflows keying on file transfers and kicking off additional steps in the process to ensure end to end automation and data processing within our firms environment. This scales up to multiple business applications for almost 24/7 processing in the background.

Pros and Cons

Provides a lot of power for powershell based processes
Extensible to multiple common use cases with SQL or other languages
AD Integration ability provides ease of access and security management
Ease of installation makes it easy to onboard end users and integrate into JAMS ecosystem

Provide more in depth documentation on both common features as well as lesser known or commonly used features. Only see a couple high level pages and it's hard to extend that knowledge into more complex use cases
Would like to see some more built in searching functions within job definitions to help filter and navigate larger folder hierarchies
Reliance on more code centric solutions for safe bulk updates can be a bit more difficult to implement on a larger environment

Return on Investment

Provided a large increase in optimization between managing jobs and automating them within a centralized environment, efficiently executing close to 3k jobs daily with minimal downtime
Added additional resiliency to our operations with the built in clustering functionality
Reduce costs with managing jams and man hours needed to integrate new users into the environment with the active directory functionality

Scalability

Very easy to scale up from a hardware and application perspective between the installation processes across multiple OSes and placing the servers within the JAMS environment. Between standing up a server and getting it connect is very easy and straight forward, the only issue with scalability is with the job management aspect. If we need to copy or apply a large number of varying jobs to the new setup it does take some time as the copy function and implementing the folder structure with appropriate settings and overrides can take up some overhead on the process.

Support Rating

The engineers at JAMS are very knowledgeable and provide in depth technical support in a timely fashion. While our group doesn't often send requests when we do the level of detail as well as clear guidance on any information on technical issues is great. For more open ended items or data related requests that may not necessarily be out of the box the do a good job of providing a framework of solutions to allow us to implement within our system.

Alternatives Considered

VisualCron

While VisualCron provided more guardrails and user centric GUI, JAMS had a better resiliency functions with their clustering and service polling and failovers. We tested this and were able to maintain a large library of jobs and data the seamlessly switches between data centers. In addition the open ended nature of some of the job definitions gives us more power to execute more complex workflows or programmatically implement various loops and sequences that wasn't previously possible in VC

Key Insights

Do you think JAMS delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with JAMS's feature set?

Yes

Did JAMS live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of JAMS go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy JAMS again?

Yes

Other Software Used

VisualCron, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

Likelihood to Recommend

JAMS excels for simpler workflows that don't require in depth coding solutions within the JAMS environment, while still providing the option and extensibility to implement larger in house scripting as the situation demands. Being able to create long sequences of simple steps works well in JAMS as it's quick and easy to implement for various end users of different skill sets as well as providing the necessary scheduling and process infrastructure to help monitor and manage these processes. Whether is navigating across external servers and running executables or transferring files, JAMS covers those areas well while adding some helpful in house settings to automate job handling and process monitoring. However if we want to extend these sequences to be more robust and automate multiple executions of jobs, the learning curve increases rather sharply to adequately leverage the JAMS library correctly and efficiently across a higher number of moving parts. Navigating the JAMS data structure takes time even with the developers guide however because the platform is more open ended finding a solution is easier to this problem.

JAMS - An Enterprising Look at Automation

Overall Satisfaction with JAMS