Control-M SaaS Starter Pack

My use cases for Control-M primarily involve scheduling, especially with applications like SAP, database plugins, and mostly OS.

Using Control-M has made it simpler to create, integrate, and automate data pipelines. We used Airflow to run data pipelines at one point, but it lacked many features that Control-M offered. Fortunately, Control-M had a plugin for Airflow, so we could use Airflow for data pipelines but schedule them via Control-M jobs, which gives us a native, feature-rich scheduling environment and integrates with data pipelines along with Airflow. BMC keeps up well with the technologies and developments out there.

What I appreciate most about Control-M is its stability. It is stable and usually does not go down. The consistency when the application restarts is flawless, and there is no usual data loss with Oracle as the backend. It is dependable based on my experience as an administrator using BMC across organizations.

Control-M is easy to integrate with other applications and technologies because it provides plugins for the latest solutions by default. If not, there is an Application Integrator built for that purpose, and there are community-driven integrations. From an alerting perspective, BMC had a very good affinity to its own tools, and it did not have ServiceNow integration, which is the most popular ITSM tool. We ended up using ancient SNMP calls to get the alerts out to custom tools. Other than that, integrations are good.

What I dislike about Control-M is that until very recently, and even now, it was not containerized or stateless. It is a stateful application, which is what I still dislike about it. It prefers its host, tries to maintain the connection, and lives on the host. It is not fully containerized or split into microservices, and it cannot be installed on anything with a database connection to start working. It prefers the host on which it was originally installed, and the statefulness of the application is what I do not like.

I have been using Control-M overall for 19 years.

Control-M is stable. Only heavy upgrades require downtime of approximately 30 minutes for the Enterprise Manager and Control-M server applications every year or every six months. Other than that, it runs continuously.

Control-M likes its nodes and is stateful. You cannot just add multiple nodes. It operates on active-passive high availability and does not scale horizontally much. Though capacity-wise it is good, at a given point in time, an instance runs on one VM, not ten. If that goes down, it can switch over to another, but that statefulness is what I do not like about scalability. It works, but it does not feel scalable. One node at a time is not scalable.

Control-M's technical support is good. For priority cases, they are quick. P1 and P2 cases respond at the earliest, while P3 takes some time based on the time zone you are in and the time zone you are signed up for. They have always been helpful and go out of their way to get things done for me.

I would give Control-M's technical support a score of nine out of ten.

I migrated from Tandem to Control-M as my organization used Tandem earlier. They brought in Control-M because they had mainframe and CS-7, and I believe that is how it started for the current organization. In the previous one, some brought it for SAP, some brought it because of the mainframes. We had cron before Control-M or the mainframe had JCLs being scheduled by the mainframe itself, and then we brought in Control-M in the 1990s.

The initial deployment of Control-M, from what I did hands-on with migrations from the OS and new projects, was seamless. I did not bring Control-M into any organization as such. I went when it was already there. I enhanced, refactored, and migrated everything. In a development environment, it is seamless. You might still sometimes need to call support, but the documentation and a case here and there, along with a little bit of experience using it, works adequately. Open source tools like Rundeck are more straightforward and easy to install, set up, and manage for someone starting, but Control-M still needs expertise in this area to get it started and working since it has its own configs and the way it works.

Control-M has gotten better at its pricing and with the latest offer for minimal jobs, it is acceptable given the value it provides. Mainframe is a bit expensive regarding the mainframe components, but I believe that is the way for any of the mainframe components. For distributed scheduling, non-mainframe, Unix, and Windows, it is reasonably priced.

I have used alternatives like Rundeck, and people use cron. I have also used Airflow, which provided some other functionality. Rundeck and Airflow are alternatives, and I regard Rundeck as an alternative.

I prefer Control-M more than the alternatives. It is a paid tool, but it is worth it.

I started working in my current field overall with Control-M after my first year in IT, so that would be 18 years.

Control-M requires maintenance on my end for patches when there are vulnerabilities, which are usually released by Control-M. Other than that, everything can be automated.

Control-M takes care of all scheduling jobs, and when you have Control-M, you do not need to use any other tools. If one application has a single server running a couple of jobs, I would still suggest using cron as that would be more suitable. If complexity arises, you can better use Control-M. Because it is not free and not unlimited, you pay per job license. Whenever something simple can be triggered by cron and easily managed, I would personally use cron on a single server with a handful of jobs. If I need alerting, monitoring, a GUI, integrations, and audit and compliance, I would switch to Control-M even if I have to pay per job. Competing scheduling tools are not usually required as Control-M will suffice with data transfer, mainframes, distributed, and everything.

My relationship with BMC is balanced between transactional and transformative. It has been good, but it depends on the organization's priorities. There was a push towards going to open source schedulers, wherein we as an organization had to wind down the job licenses. The licensing calls are always tricky and handled by the vendor management team. They have their own logistics. I am a purely technical person making technical decisions, and I probably push something if it is good, but then it would go that way. BMC genuinely tries to help their customers. They have built us plugins, but at the same time, it is about the money.

Overall, I would give Control-M a rating of eight out of ten because it is not vertically scalable, and they did not fully containerize it or make it into microservices. For that reason, I would give it an eight. If not for those issues, I would give it a nine.

Control-M did consolidate job scheduler tools in my organization by pulling it all in one place.

What I like the most about Control-M is the task management, specifically the ability to integrate with multiple products and successfully complete repetitive tasks with ease.

It is easy to integrate Control-M with other technologies as my DataOps and DevOps processes change.

Control-M is excellent for building, scheduling, managing, and monitoring production workflows, but I would not use it for monitoring purposes.

The feature I would like to add is related to the licensing model, which I find challenging. The licensing model is based on the number of repetitive runs rather than the number of tasks. Sometimes it is difficult to understand how many runs we may have in a particular requirement.

I have been using Control-M overall for the last year.

Control-M is pretty scalable based on what we are currently using. However, what we intend to do is try to reduce its application and use it more effectively rather than scaling it.

Regarding technical support, we have a support contract, and when we reach out to them, the response is always very fast. Whatever we need gets addressed quickly.

Before Control-M, we were using Ansible.

The initial deployment of Control-M was fairly easy. I don't exactly remember how long it took the first time, but I think it was set up entirely in two hours.

I have used alternatives, but nothing comes close to Control-M because the advantage that Control-M has is the ability to convert business applications data integration into other IT-related solutions that we use. In other cases, we would have to use multiple middleware. There are products evolving in the market that we are seeing that could be utilized here, but nothing is completely replacing Control-M fully. We really have to look into custom development to plug those gaps.

I have been working in my current field as a professional for the last 18 years.

Control-M does require maintenance on my end. The overall server management involves ensuring that patches, vulnerability validations, and related tasks are properly handled because we have it in an on-premises deployment. Many deployments need this level of attention when it comes to patch management and vulnerabilities. Those are the types of maintenance and version controls required.

I would give Control-M an overall score of 8.5 out of 10.

My main use case for Control-M comes from when I was an operations analyst, using it for scheduling, reporting, and others, and now as a supervisor ensuring that our people are up to date on all the procedures and practices for the product and ensuring that the product is working well for our needs.

Currently, my team uses Control-M for maintaining, processing, and scheduling our nightly batch cycles, and we are in the midst of a conversion from an MVS system to another using Control-M as its primary application for our scheduling and batch processing needs.

I manage the team that actually uses Control-M, so it is very intuitive, and our people seem to catch on to it rather quickly. They appreciate the product, they appreciate the functionality, and so far everything is working well.

Control-M has impacted our organization positively, and we appreciate it so much that we moved from using Tivoli on the mainframe. It is more intuitive with more robust features, and from my experience using Control-M at previous places, we were very pleased with it, so I am sure this newer version is robust, user-friendly, and intuitive.

I do see specific outcomes of reduced errors and faster processing since switching, although I don't observe the metrics of it as I am more of a supervisor of a group of users, but I am sure that it is happening because overall, it is very effective.

In my opinion, the best features that Control-M offers are ease of use and predictability. It is very easy to use and very intuitive, it does not take much to find errors in our processing, and the flexibility to restart and hold job streams is very good. Our team seems to pick it up very well and even if they had not used this product previously, they are appreciating it now.

The flexibility of Control-M has helped my team in practice, especially when we run our batch cycle throughout the night. Our operations analysts work only until about 8:00 p.m. or maybe 9:00 p.m., and during the evening, we have our operations staff doing the monitoring and ensuring that if there are errors with the processes, we can contact the programmers on call. Our staff does not need to be as knowledgeable as our operations analyst staff, making holding and restarting jobs easy for them.

Nothing comes to my attention regarding improvements needed for Control-M. There was a discussion of a stop button where one simple click would stop a whole process, which would be useful if we encounter an error, but I am not sure if that was suggested or implemented.

I have been using Control-M since 2000.

I would rate Control-M a 10 overall. From all the different users and groups involved with this project—including the programming staff—everyone appreciates the functionality, and I feel confident that I could step in there to restart or hold jobs if needed, indicating that anyone could handle the basics in case of absences or illnesses.

I chose a rating of 10 because it is something that everyone finds very intuitive. People enjoy using it for its simplicity, and the options we get in its use are very helpful and tailored to our needs, with different divisions and groups involved all being pleased with its process.

We have a security team that scrutinizes all our applications, and I have not been privy to any information from that department.

I do not believe my team has had issues with Control-M's accuracy and reliability of output, as I am aware that AI is a big focus, but unfortunately, I do not have any detailed information on its uses and capabilities.

My advice to others looking into using Control-M is to start using it and not be afraid to try it. I would feel that everyone would be very satisfied with the product since it is very user-friendly and a good fit for any large or small company regarding scheduling and processing monitoring needs.