Introduction to Systems Management
In this MVA track, we introduce the concept of joined-up, or ‘integrated’, systems management and show how it can help address many of the issues IT professionals face today.
The problem we’re helping people solve
For many companies, IT has grown haphazardly, accumulating a patchwork of applications, infrastructure and tools. The end result is that it takes a lot of time, money and resources to manage and change is difficult to implement.
Putting in place effective systems management enables IT to be more responsive to change and better aligned to the needs of the business. The result is that both the company and end-users are generally much more satisfied with the performance of the IT department.
How companies currently manage their IT
There are three broad approaches today’s companies take to manage their systems:
- The ad-hoc approach. Companies that adopt this approach tend to have the fewest number of people managing resources. They also usually have the lowest level of investment in IT and very low satisfaction ratings.
- Semi-structured with a good degree of flexibility. This approach takes some of the concepts of service management frameworks and implements those that make sense. It allows things to be managed well enough and focus resources on other areas.
- Highly structured with strictly defined policies and processes. This people-intensive route is the one taken in industries where regulation and compliance are paramount or where IT is fundamental to the business’s very existence.
Changing systems, processes and minds
Changes and processes are generally implemented by people, not systems. And people work in human timescales and are prone to error. Without automation, the private cloud is likely to be unworkable in practice.
Automation can help add value to IT by enabling staff to work on high value services rather than being stretched beyond their limits on routine work. But trust is a big element. Many IT managers feel uncomfortable having systems make automatic decisions in real-time. That’s why we suggest putting in place service monitoring and alerting systems. These help begin the process of automation by alerting managers to issues and recommending courses of action.
Moving to a service-centric approach to IT
Today, a growing number of companies are focusing on what must delivered first and then managing the systems in such as way as to guarantee – as far as practical – the quality of the service regardless of the systems that make it up.
This demands that a holistic view must be taken across all systems. It involves looking at application performance and proactively testing the individual systems. And it enables immediate remediation to be put in place before a problem becomes noticeable to users.
The starting point is getting IT more closely engaged with the business. This is predominantly about getting to know the issues and drivers that the organisation as a whole is facing. The next stage is to take this understanding and translate it into the specifics of what’s required from IT. The ideal result is a mutual agreement on the portfolio of services to be delivered and the recognition of the investment needed to underpin it.
How can System Center 2012 help?
System Center 2012 offers the critical systems management capabilities today’s companies need:
- App Controller allows application owners to manage their apps across private and public environments
- Service Manager offers the standardised self-service catalogue that defines “templates” for your applications and infrastructure
- App Controller, Virtual Machine Manager, Service Manager and Operations Manager work together to maintain the service model
- Orchestrator and Service Manager enable orchestrated automation for the process workflows required to drive your provisioning and monitoring tools
- Virtual Machine Manager and Configuration Manager provision physical, virtual and cloud environments
- And Operations Manager monitors your application services to help you deliver predictable service levels
- Importantly, it doesn’t matter where your datacentre resources are deployed – from physical boxes to public cloud