Xcel Energy Reduces Manual Database Processes by 80% 

An ActiveBatch Workload Automation Success Story

Xcel Energy’s nuclear division relies on data to maintain and control the two nuclear power plants it operates in the US. However, the job scheduler they relied on was becoming unstable as workloads increased, compounding a host of other issues:
  • Xcel had to run an overnight IT shift to manually monitor overnight processes as workload volumes expanded;
  • Xcel was unable to build end-to-end workflows without first researching, writing, and testing custom scripts, straining resources and making change difficult;
  • An inability to dynamically trigger workflows and manage key dependencies between various systems was making the IT environment overly complex and unwieldy.

By The Numbers

80%

Time spent manually managing Oracle Database processes has been reduced by over 80%.

>500

ActiveBatch provides over 500 prebuilt Job Steps and integrations, allowing Xcel Energy to drastically reduce its need for custom scripts.

Read the Case Study

Xcel Energy Implements ActiveBatch

Xcel Energy chose ActiveBatch because it needed an IT automation solution that could handle a hybrid Windows/UNIX environment, with support for Linux platforms and Informatica PowerCenter:

  • Runtime monitoring allows Xcel to proactively monitor jobs and to take preemptive actions when a job is estimated to run longer than expected;
  • ActiveBatch’s alerting and error-handling framework will automatically restart any job that fails and will immediately notify the proper personnel;
  • ActiveBatch’s Integrated Jobs Library, with hundreds of prebuilt integrations, enabled Xcel to build cross-platform processes between PowerCenter, Windows, and UNIX;
  • ActiveBatch Job Variables automatically populate workflow parameters at runtime, ensuring accuracy and data quality.

In Their Own Words

“ActiveBatch has been an invaluable addition to our IT inventory and is the tool that allows us to sleep well at night.”

“ActiveBatch provides the flexibility and level of control that we require to automate PowerCenter, in addition to the other application processes that PowerCenter is dependent on, all from a single point of control… no scripting required.”

“Having to hard code that into scripts to automate those data warehousing steps takes a lot of time and a lot of testing. That’s why finding a scheduling solution with direct integration of PowerCenter was so important.”

“For its price and out-of-the-box functionality, ActiveBatch [compared to Autosys] was the value-added selection that was much easier to implement.”

How Xcel Energy Succeeded with ActiveBatch

With ActiveBatch’s monitoring, alerting, and error-handling capabilities, Xcel no longer needs an overnight shift to manually manage datacenter processes.

ActiveBatch is used to dynamically trigger workflows and manage key dependencies across the entire IT environment, without relying on custom scripts.

A single solution handles all the interfaces between Xcel’s primary business applications and data warehousing processes, simplifying the IT environment.


Get a Demo