ActiveBatch Workload Automation vs. IBM Event Automation

Any large business or organisation that wants to manage their workload effectively and with the least amount of room for error might choose the ActiveBatch Automation tool. Being a consultant I feel that It aids in task automation and has the flexibility to change in response to varying company requirements. It helps to save huge time by doing all the repetitive tasks on daily basis. During the patching activity the schedulers can be stopped. It also help by alerting us if any system/job is down so that SLA can be saved. Overall ActiveBatch Automation stands as a dependable cornerstone for ensuring the seamless operation of our tasks.

Incentivized

IBM Event Streams is well suited for companies developing event driven Microservices. One of the biggest challenger with microservices is that your data gets distributed into little silos - event streaming (or better known as event sourcing) allows you to get a central source of truth in your event store. We are taking this approach with IBM Event Streams and it is well suited for building an event streaming / sourcing architecture.

Incentivized

• Makes scheduling easy to understand, follow, and rerun jobs when necessary.
• Allows for cross-team coordination of scheduled tasks which reduces errors.
• Makes stopping jobs easy when needed for server/database downtime.
• Scripting enables us to easily change email addresses for failed job alerts.
• Nested plans/jobs make creating and changing dependencies simple.

Incentivized

• It is adaptive and helps us create more engaging experiences on our platforms.
• The Key metrics dashboard is rich with insights.

Incentivized

• String handling / parsing. I find myself using PowerShell to do a fair amount of text parsing (particularly if manipulations are needed) - not necessarily a bad thing, but certainly a place where ActiveBatch could be improved.
• Debugging - or lack of it! With no stepping debugger, it can be a longer process than many other programming / scripting environments: rather than simply stepping through and observing state changes, I find myself inserting logging steps to excess, then having to clean them up once the error is found.
• The perennial - Documentation! While a near-universal complaint for *any* software, ActiveBatch's developer documentation is somewhat spotty - just where I need detail, I find summary-level info. There is lots of documentation (as there should be for a tool with such a wide range of applications), but it is in mixed formats (some PDF, some CHM), and the descriptions of specific fields within job steps is often little more than I can get in a tool-tip in the GUI. Allowable ranges, expected formats for string data, and similar helpful details are inconsistent.
• The KnowledgeBase at ASCI's web site often has examples which answer the questions I have, but not always - and not always under the search terms one would think to use.

• Even if you have experience with other event streaming software, you'll still have to take the IBM course because of its complexity.

Incentivized

We can easily add new plans/jobs in our batch schedules. Also, coordination with reporting and QA jobs is simple to do. Building schedules, restarting jobs, triggering dependencies is easy to understand. The system is very stable and allows us to easily see overall processing times.

Incentivized

The product was very user friendly and extremely easy to get started with. The documentation is excellent and the free tier makes it very easy to get started with without having to make deep or long term financial commitments.

Incentivized

My colleague contacted them directly, I only know hearsay on this but it was not good.

Incentivized

I met with the support team and they have deep technical and development understanding of the needs and the problems which IBM Event Streams addresses. If you are looking for a product backed by a highly technical support team then IBM Event Streams is probably the best choice. I was specifically impressed by the level of technical understanding my support team demonstrated.

Incentivized

The workload automation solution is based on the specific needs of an organization, as well as the features, capabilities, and costs of various solutions. A thorough evaluation process and consideration of these factors can help ensure the selection of a solution that aligns with overall business objectives and meets the specific needs of the organization.

Incentivized

We are still in the evaluation process. To enable an event streaming platform for enterprise, IBM Event Streams is a strong candidate due to the ease of use and setup in the cloud. There are many capabilities we are trying to understand to see if IBM Event Streams is the right fit for our needs. I would rate its platform behind Confluent Cloud.

Incentivized

• ActiveBatch can automate intricate procedures and minimise manual involvement, which can boost an organization's production and efficiency.
• Organisations can save money by using ActiveBatch to automate operations, which lowers the expenses of manual labour and potential mistakes.
• Implementing ActiveBatch could come with hefty up-front expenses including licencing, instruction, and consultancy fees, which could have a short-term negative impact on ROI.

• In using downstreams, the minimal features and the rate of releases were slow, makes us feel that there's no upgrades and other than that there's poor marketing of the product.
• The adoption around the service is low, requires focused marketing.
• Lack of visibility into topic depth , Monitoring capabilities

Incentivized