Find your way through the maze of systems management products
Systems administration teams typically react to problems rather than proactively detect problems before they affect hundreds of users. Several factors contribute to the reactive nature of systems administrators, including insufficient IS staff resources, nonadherence to preventive procedures such as regular backups and periodic scanning of event logs, and inherent technological limitations. Systems management technology helps you proactively monitor, alert, and manage your discrete systems from one console or across multiple operating system (OS) platforms.
In most corporate IS environments with distributed systems, the IS manager's goal is to increase availability and reduce costs. Instead of managing only one or two centralized mainframe systems with few places to look for events or logs, the administrator has thousands of distributed servers and workstations that generate events. This situation requires enterprise-level systems management tools that can monitor, collect information from, report on, and manage devices to lower the cost of maintaining a distributed environment, increase its availability, and guarantee service levels.
You can choose from several systems management tools. Single-function tools solve only one or two systems management problems (e.g., capturing event logs, monitoring disk usage by user). You might be tempted to use single-function tools to solve your day-to-day problems, and these tools might be right for your environment's size. However, if you plan to expand your Windows NT environment, or if you need to integrate your systems management tools across OS platforms, you'll want to evaluate single-function tools for their ability to integrate into larger solutions. In this article, I'll focus on enterprise systems management packages that you can use to monitor your systems in an NT environment. These tools are fully functional and enable a variety of capabilities. I'll discuss the most common systems management solutions: framework solutions and vertical solutions.
Framework Solutions vs. Vertical Solutions
Framework packages give you the basic architecture and tools to create an enterprise systems management infrastructure and let you implement the framework details. These packages are typically platform independent. Most frameworks scale to large enterprises and might not be appropriate for your organization's size. Frameworks are difficult to implement and require a large amount of up-front planning and customization. You need to clearly outline what you want your systems management framework to accomplish before you spend time implementing it. Systems management vendors recognize the problem of implementing a framework without the resources to complete the implementation. Companies such as Computer Associates (CA) and Tivoli Systems have developed lightweight systems management solutions that are geared toward smaller enterprises with fewer than 1000 nodes.
Vertical solutions accommodate specific environments, such as NT, and they can provide you with some platform independence. These solutions are often ready to run out of the box, but they sometimes aren't customizable. Some vertical solutions aren't scalable, and you might have a hard time integrating them if you move from a platform such as NT to a platform such as UNIX, Novell, or MVS.
Framework and vertical solutions have advantages and disadvantages. Thus, you'll want to ensure that your systems management product can integrate or interoperate with other vendors' products. You need to carefully examine how complete the integration or interoperability is. Some vendors say their products integrate, when they've merely put an icon on another systems management console's menu.