RunMyJobs has improved our process scheduling, but some aspects are still lackluster
Updated May 04, 2021
RunMyJobs has improved our process scheduling, but some aspects are still lackluster
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Redwood Business Process Automation
RunMyJobs is being used across all of IT to provide a centralized point of processing, monitoring, and alerting for our business processes running on Windows Servers, AS/400 (iSeries), and Linux platforms, as well as direct JDBC connections to databases. Before implementation, processes were scheduled in various independent areas, such as windows task scheduler, with no alerting and no visibility for an operations team to monitor. In addition, before RMJ, cross-platform processes just had to be scheduled in good faith that prerequisites finished on time and successfully. RMJ solves that issue as well.
- Upgrades are fast and can be done in a "lights-out" manner
- The ability to organize functions into applications is very helpful
- Events such as a file watcher to kick off a process when a file is detected are done very well
- The documentation is lacking severely, many times even leading to a suggestion of paying for professional services to figure out processes. Also not updating documentation when a new release makes the old documentation obsolete.
- AS400/iSeries has been a constant battle since inception, once an update fixes one thing, another seems to break within the AS400/iSeries space, and sometimes the fixes don't actually fix the issue. Over time now this has gotten much beter.
- Allowing an issue to go back and forth within a ticket countless times (sometimes over 40 responses) without just getting everyone together on a meeting. Update - this has gotten much better with time.
- Communication needs a lot of improvement. I have had to reach out to support just to get release notes when a new release is made available.
- The ability to get accurate counts of historical process runs is limited currently to 35 days and since you are billed for each process run in all environments, not just Production, this limits accountability in historical billing inquiries.
- Automation
- Scalability
- Alerting
- An issue occurred when we ran out of "credits" much sooner than anticipated. Further investigation showed a process in a TEST environment that was scheduled to run every 15 minutes was accidentally submitted on a schedule twice (so 2 processes running every 15 minutes). At that time we didn't even have the ability to run a report to find the rogue process, the vendor had to run it for us. That lack of ability for the customer was one thing, but to be dinged for non-production is also a point of contention.
- Positively for the processes that report correctly, it has been a big benefit for our IT Operations team to have the centralized monitoring of our critical processes.
- The ability to have a centralized system for our operations team to monitor and receive alerts has been very beneficial.
I was not part of the decision making on choosing RunMyJobs, but my understanding on what made RMJ stand out was the fact that it is in the cloud, with no infrastructure support needed on our side, as well as a promise that you could schedule and monitor jobs within ServiceNow. We later found out the ServiceNow promise was not correct and still don't have a direct method as of this writing.
Do you think Redwood RunMyJobs delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Redwood RunMyJobs's feature set?
Yes
Did Redwood RunMyJobs live up to sales and marketing promises?
No
Did implementation of Redwood RunMyJobs go as expected?
No
Would you buy Redwood RunMyJobs again?
Yes
Redwood RunMyJobs Feature Ratings
Using Redwood Business Process Automation
20 - Data Warehouse, Application Development, IT Operations, Server Engineering, Application Support
3 - It helps to have a broad understanding of IT functions for how we use runmyjobs, for instance, I know how to reboot a windows server via command line (although google will tell you as well), then to call an SSIS package on a SQL server, run a batch file, etc... With just that broad knowledge it makes it easier to understand the processes you have to support in the product. From there it is just repetition in the various aspects, such as the calendar functions, alerting, events, etc...
- Process Automation
- Monitoring
- Alerting
- Centralization
- Create ServiceNow incidents for the owning teams when a process fails.
- Schedule reboots for troublesome servers.
- Execute ServiceNow scheduled jobs via RMJ.
- Hopefully SFTP.
Evaluating Redwood Business Process Automation and Competitors
- Price
- Product Features
- Product Usability
Being a redwood customer certainly helped, as well as the price for an enterprise scheduler in the cloud.
I think it would have been nice to have had some time to work through the tool, but I was trained while we were trying to implement, so it would be nice to have more time to get an overall understanding of the product before being live, but it all worked out.
Redwood Business Process Automation Implementation
- Third-party professional services
Redwood assisted in the implementation
Redwood Business Process Automation Support
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed Immediate help available Support understands my problem Support cares about my success Quick Initial Response | None |
I'm unaware of the premium support.
Using Redwood Business Process Automation
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Like to use Well integrated Consistent Convenient Feel confident using | Slow to learn Lots to learn |
- File Watcher events
- Alerts for processes in certain states (error state mostly)
- Process chains that involve multiple steps
- The promotion of multiple objects from one environment to another can be a little cumbersome one at a time.
- Acknowledging multiple operator messages, if not from the same process can be a bit cumbersome.