EM7 Enhancing the Strengths of CA AutoSys

June 3rd, 2008 by David Link

Which new features make the cut? Our EM7 Meta-appliance new features functionality has been growing about 100-200+ new features with each major release. We receive over 100+ new feature requests each month from customers and prospects.

As our business has grown and the product functionality has grown, the challenge has been to make the right call on which features are added for next release. As you can imagine there is intense pressure and competition to get this part of the business right so we can deliver solutions that the marketplace needs and wants.

Problem and Solution

A while back, we had a request to add new functionality to support a customer who extensively used CAs AutoSys product. Each night the customer ran over 10,000+ jobs. In the process of the customer running this mission critical operations tool, the scheduled jobs, (managed by AutoSys), would create dozens of error logs each night with jobs that did not properly complete.

The customer’s dilemma was to help set-up a “lay-person’s perspective” (for the 24 x 7 graveyard NOC shift) to view these events within EM7’s Event Kiosk and have more intuitive perspective of the impact to particular mission critical systems. Specifically they wanted the AutoSys job return code in the event message (which was not available through the AutoSys MIB) so their IT operations team could intuitively see the business impact. We enhanced a feature of our product called “Virtual Devices” to accept these events and provide the Event Kisok with a full business view.

This is a case where the enhancement request decision was quite easy:

1. AutoSys is so dominant in the marketplace and adding value to a market leading product is strategically important to delivering a clear value proposition.
2. Soon after we deployed EM7 for this customer, they had identified AutoSys enhanced event management integration was critical to their core operational needs; so naturally we wanted to deliver a solution that solved a high business impact problem, which in turn could benefit all of our customers.

If you are currently an AutoSys customer and have found clever ways to consolidate events that tie back to your OSS / Manager of Manager systems, we would love to hear your experiences and any of the cool ways that you have enhanced the value of AutoSys.

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June 3rd, 2008