General question on Usage

[Anon Anon]

Hi,

I'm fairly new to UC4 (now about 3 weeks in, I think) and I was wondering, what sorts of things do you guys do with UC4 for your companies?

Don't give away any company secrets, mind, but right now I'm using it to do network testing automatically, transferring files and running powershell scripts but it's pretty minor so I'm wondering how to take it to the next level.

Right now I'm looking into automating some of our EBS/Oracle stuff and Peoplesoft stuff, but I was curious what everyone else was using it for.

Any insight is appreciated!
-Bertie

[Anon Anon]

Our main thrust has been to automate what is generally thought of as production batch processing though we also use it for our full scale integration testing.  It has replaced various other scheduling and automation products such as Unix chron, Windows Task Scheduler, SAP Schedule Manager, Mainframe scheduler (JobTrac), etc.  Its initial selling point was its cross platform capabilities far exceeded that of other products available at the time.

We have about 130,000 objects and execute about 25,000 process flows a day in our production Client. Within those process flows are about 17,000 file transfers and 50,000 jobs.

We are looking at using it to automate our change management/control process for migrating various kinds of components into the production environment.  We are not certain if we will "roll our own" or perhaps use the Application Release Automation (ARA) component.

[Jim Griffith]

As I feel a little inadequate from Mark's answer, we have only a mere 30,000 objects and run about 22,000 of those every 24 hrs. We also use it mainly for batch processing. We run a vast assortment of unix scripts, exes, bat files, powershell, sql scripts, and oracle scripts. We do about 800 file transfers to outside entities and probably receive another 400 that all move through Automic. 

I am currently building an in-house process to allow application developers to migrate their own code into our production environment by submitting one of several processes through the web interface. 

[Pete Wirfs]

Small shop here, maybe 300 jobs a day.  We do a lot of business critical stuff like printing checks to our insurance claimants, sending out insurance policy documents, pushing/pulling data to over 30 different datacenters via SFTP on the UC4 FTP agent.    Of course each of these solutions represents a large development effort by our applications group.

We also have customer applications invoking UC4 jobs by using the CALLAPI interface.  For instance an insurance agent can request an extract of their business with us.  It submits a UC4 job which does the extract and emails the results to the requestor in the form of a PDF or Excel attachment.

I also like using the UC4 DB agent that lets UC4 run commands on Oracle and SQLServer.

I've only recently started rolling out PowerShell solutions to automate stuff that our software support staff have been doing manually.  

[Anon Anon]

Jim:

No need to feel inadequate.  I was at an Innovate conference about 5 years ago and was talking to another attendee discussing our respective environments.  She mentioned that they had close to a thousand offices around the world and executed about one million jobs per day.  I seem to remember that is was some kind of medical or drug distribution system.  They appeared to be using UC4, from my view, as a transaction processor.  Each query or update was a batch process as was the printing of every invoice or shipping document.  I still shudder at the thought but she was very satisfied with the implementation and UC4's abilities.

Maybe they are members of this forum and will chime in and correct me if I'm mis-remembering any of the details.

[Jim Griffith]

It does amaze me what and how much people do with the software. How many active systems do you have for your production environment? We're running an active/active for our production with 2 quad core VMs. Then an active/passive for our QA and a single active for Dev. 

6979faefbacb4dee06d02fb1aad9714d  we are running PeopleSoft and oracle processes here. As Pete mentioned, using the DB agent is a great way of running SQL and Oracle jobs. Unfortunately we couldn't justify the purchase since we already had a solution. All of our SQL jobs are run using SQLCMD and our oracle guys use in house built shell scripts that select the primary DB or a clone to hit and uses sqlplus to run the oracle command.  

[Anon Anon]

Jim:

I don't know our actual topology as I have no duties associated with that portion of UC4's care and feeding.  I can state that we have 3 separate systems spread over three physical data centers. The systems are: one production with a single active Client, one development/testing with multiple Clients and one for UC4 product maintenance.