Network and Systems Management: Bulldozing the Mountain of Complexity

by Denise Kalm, Rob Steiskal
December 1, 2008

Both network administrators and systems programmers must be able to manage resource demand and performance from an IT and business perspective. From the IT perspective, it’s about tasks, processes, transaction processing systems, and databases. From the business perspective, it’s about business service levels, composite business transactions, and so on. But overall, it’s really about delivering service to the business: anticipating, detecting, and quickly resolving technology-based problems to maintain required business service levels.

Conclusion

Today, systems management needs to be proactive, with alerts designed to highlight problems before they impact users and dashboards designed to highlight issues fostering intelligent root cause analysis. Other essential capabilities include:

• Reporting tools that let you share key service level, performance, and problem management information across your consumer base to ensure all stakeholders have access to the management metrics germane to their particular role

• Comprehensive data stores that can be mined for the purpose of trending, problem analysis, establishing baselines, and that support the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) goal of a Capacity Management Information Store (CMIS)

• Resource utilization data that can be reliably used for capacity management, including both machine and network resources, with support for resource utilization tracking (from both a technology and business perspective)— so it’s possible to forecast capacity needs based on the growth of individual services.

Are your current management tools keeping up with existing and anticipated business requirements? If your business has fewer people and less money to manage an increasingly complex data center, you need to have the right solutions in place.

1. What if you could be more productive, spend less time on mundane, boring, or tedious tasks, and enjoy your job more? It’s quite possible you already have the right tools, but haven’t had or allocated the time to fully exploit them. The time you take to learn a new tool will be rewarded by the success you enjoy on the job. Everything is changing on an almost daily basis. Perhaps today is the day you begin to consider replacing your screwdriver with a high-speed drill. The latter does more, faster, and with less effort. The “mountain” of complexity is only getting steeper. Blast it away by ensuring the right management solutions are in place today and that those solutions position you to address tomorrow’s challenges.