Tidal by Redwood Review
Updated December 13, 2023

Tidal by Redwood Review

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Tidal by Redwood

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.
  • After 2023 - Negative. It costs too much to renew
  • Before 2023 - Positive - It enables building complex, reliable, fault-tolerant workflows without outright writing an entirely new application.
The time-to-deliver an automated job was much less with Tidal by Redwood than the other automation solutions. Tidal by Redwood product is much more evolved than many newer market contenders.

Do you think Tidal by Redwood delivers good value for the price?

Not sure

Are you happy with Tidal by Redwood's feature set?

Yes

Did Tidal by Redwood live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Tidal by Redwood go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Tidal by Redwood again?

Yes

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.

Tidal by Redwood Feature Ratings

Workload Automation
9.0
Multi-platform scheduling
9
Central monitoring
10
Logging
10
Alerts and notifications
9
Analysis and visualization
8
Application integration
8

Using Tidal by Redwood

200 - Accounting, Billing, Data Warehouse, Regulatory Compliance, System Engineers, DevOps, Application Development Teams, Offshore support.
15 - Operations, System Administrators, Engineer
  • Managed File Transfers with Financial Counterparties
  • Data Warehouse Operations
  • Internal File Transfers within-company
  • Scheduled maintenance and DevOps related tasks
  • Reporting
  • Daily Processing of client data
  • DevOps related activity - automating wherever possible to avoid manual work
  • Scripted solutions which augment standard monitoring. Repeated scheduled innocuous transactions whose success or failures indicates other issues in the environment.
We are on the fence. The increased pricing for renewals is staggering. With new automation options like Microsoft's Power Automate and Event Driven Ansible on the field, there are other options now available.

Tidal by Redwood Implementation

Having provided consulting services for years on Tidal by Redwood, I recommend going with a solutions partner or consultant to deploy it. I believe there are sizing and tuning guidelines that should be followed for environments of scale. I believe they are not critical when first lighting up the product, but if you are not aware of them you will encounter performance degradation after a few thousand job objects are added.
  • Third-party professional services
With 14 years of experience in Tidal by Redwood, I can provide these services myself.
Yes - 
1. build DEV (this takes the longest as you determine the rules for the environment, database connectivity, server permissions, performance benchmarks)
2. load test DEV (this takes some skill ... create dummy jobs to simulate job load, job execution loads, database I/O, network traffic, communication with member agents)
3. tune DEV to perform acceptably under load. requisition more CPU/memory/disk space as necessary until performance is acceptable
4. build other nonProd environments based on findings from #1 thru #3. Provision the infrastructure based on prior findings for DEV
5. build PROD as a single master
6. if budget permits, build in fault tolerance for PROD, adding a Backup Master
7. test failover capability and reliability for fault tolerant PROD
8. (this one takes weeks, months) begin using the product --> grow your jobs
Change management was a small part of the implementation and was well-handled - New implementations seldom involve change management hurdles. Migrating existing implementations do. I recommend using a consultant for migrations. They will provide risk mitigation steps and assist in building confidence for dealing with Change Management.
  • I believe the initial build of the new version that I built had flaws (scheduler hangs during compilation) that were already known to the vendor. A later build was available which addressed the flaws. However, you had to know to ask for it in my opinion. I believe the fix was not provided built into the GA download.
  • We had to confirm that all of our Agent and Adapter connections would actually connect to the new master. We had to test all of them before going live. This required a lot of network testing and opening up tickets with the firewall and network teams. (This happens everywhere with all types of workload schedulers)
  • This was a migration and required a lot of database work to ensure smooth cutover. As a former consultant, I knew what to do but it still takes a lot of time. I strongly recommend going with a consultant for migrating systems.

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