Core Functional Areas and Alternatives
ActiveBatch is a Workload Automation and Enterprise Job Scheduling platform produced by Advanced Systems Concepts, Inc (ASCI).
ActiveBatch contains feature sets in many different areas of automation. Below are some key areas where ActiveBatch assists IT teams automate, manage, and monitor their workflows and tech stacks.
| Functional Areas and Software Categories | ActiveBatch | Alternatives |
|---|---|---|
| Job Scheduling The process of scheduling, triggering, and running resource-intensive workloads, generally in overnight periods referred to as batch windows. Modern job schedulers have advanced date/time, fiscal calendar, and interval-based options for ultimate flexibility. | ✅ Included | Quartz Enterprise Job SchedulerSystem Center Orchestrator (SCORCH)Crontab jobs |
| IT DevOps An agile framework and strategy focused on collaboration between development and operational teams. IT DevOps tools assist IT developers with low-code development functions, and provide operations with up-to-date information, documentation, and remediation functions. Plus, they offer channels to collaborate across functional teams, securely promote objects between environments, and more. | ✅ Included | ContinuumCircleCICyclr |
| Workflow Mapping and Orchestration Workflow Mapping allows IT teams to quickly and effectively route end-to-end workflows from one point to another based on conditional logic, business rules, or other constraints. Workflow mapping tools can feature graphical displays that allow users to visualize dependencies between workflow components.Orchestration tools allow diverse systems and applications to communicate with one another and be collectively managed from a single console. | ✅ Included | Rapid7TrackViaZapier |
| Hybrid Cloud Management Modern IT infrastructures contain a combination of on-prem, cloud, and virtual systems. Hybrid Cloud Management tools help IT monitor their cloud and virtual machines and dynamically scale resources to meet real-time demands. | ✅ Included | DynatraceAmazon Web Services (AWS) CloudWatchMicrosoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager |
| All-In-One Operations Monitoring Operational teams need to know what’s happening at a moment’s notice. Real-time, all-in-one operations monitoring provides a single pane of glass to monitor workflows, activities, and machine loads. This end-to-end visibility allows operators to troubleshoot problems faster by making it easy to drill into the individual components that caused a setback. | ✅ Included | DatadogOpsViewSplunk Enterprise |
| Managed File Transfer Automation Secure and reliable file transfers are essential processes within every enterprise. Managed File Transfer Automation takes simple file transfers to the next level, with parallel transfer capabilities, validation checks, templated transfer logic, centralized credential and connection info management, and more. | ✅ Included | GoAnywhere MFTCitrix ShareFileIBM Sterling |
| Intelligent Resource Optimization and Machine Load Management Intelligent resource optimization is the process of using machine learning, predictive analytics, and dynamic scaling to automatically distribute workloads among disparate machine resources. Machine load monitoring not only visualizes which machines have the highest loads, but is also used by the system to dynamically balance machine loads. | ✅ Included | Kemp LoadMasterNew Relic InfrastructureLogicMonitor |
| Service Level Agreement Management and Conditional Alerting Service Level Agreement (SLA) Management is a critical component of modern IT. SLA Management involves monitoring and tracking KPIs related to IT and business process service level performance. Conditional alerting is a required element of SLA Management, as Operations teams need to know relevant, context-aware information as soon as possible in the event of a potential breach.SLA Management tools will sometimes provide automated remediation capabilities such as provisioning additional resources to SLA processes at risk of failure. | ✅ Included | FreshserviceEasyVistaPipefy |
| Self-Service and Help Desk Automation Self-Service Portals assist business users with common issues that would otherwise require inundating IT with Help Desk requests. Automated remediation and troubleshooting functionality also assist with Help Desk Management by reducing time-to-resolution and eliminating the need for human intervention on repetitive incidents. | ✅ Included | ServiceNowJira Service DeskRescueAssist |
Coordinate and Consolidate Automation Tools
ActiveBatch Workload Automation’s low-code API accessibility makes orchestration simple. That means, should you adopt any of the tools above, ActiveBatch can help coordinate these tools to improve monitoring, security, and control.
Gartner states that most organizations have 3-8 scheduling and automation tools in place. Many of the business process automation and IT automation tools above are highly capable in their specialty area, but don’t easily communicate with one another and often lack advanced scheduling abilities.
Unified workload automation tools like ActiveBatch have more advanced frameworks for end-to-end, enterprise-grade automation. Plus, features like centralized monitoring, reporting, logging, security, and management of automated workflows provide functions beyond what other tools can offer.