Systems management


Systems management is enterprise-wide administration of distributed systems including computer systems. Systems management is strongly influenced by network management initiatives in telecommunications. The application performance management technologies are now a subset of Systems management. Maximum productivity can be achieved more efficiently through event correlation, system automation and predictive analysis which is now all part of APM.

Discussion

Centralized management has a time and effort trade-off that is related to the size of the company, the expertise of the IT staff, and the amount of technology being used:
  • For a small business startup with ten computers, automated centralized processes may take more time to learn how to use and implement than just doing the management work manually on each computer.
  • A very large business with thousands of similar employee computers may clearly be able to save time and money, by having IT staff learn to do systems management automation.
  • A small branch office of a large corporation may have access to a central IT staff, with the experience to set up automated management of the systems in the branch office, without need for local staff in the branch office to do the work.
Systems management may involve one or more of the following tasks:
  • Hardware inventories.
  • Server availability monitoring and metrics.
  • Software inventory and installation.
  • Anti-virus and anti-malware.
  • User's activities monitoring.
  • Capacity monitoring.
  • Security management.
  • Storage management.
  • Network capacity and utilization monitoring.
  • Identity Access Management
  • Anti-manipulation management

    Functions

Functional groups are provided according to International Telecommunication Union Telecommunication Standardization Sector Common management information protocol standard. This framework is also known as Fault, Configuration, Accounting, Performance, Security.
; Fault management
; Configuration management
; Hardware and software inventory
; Accounting management
; Performance management
; Security management
However this standard should not be treated as comprehensive, there are obvious omissions. Some are recently emerging sectors, some are implied and some are just not listed. The primary ones are:
Performance management functions can also be split into end-to-end performance measuring and infrastructure component measuring functions. Another recently emerging sector is operational intelligence which focuses on real-time monitoring of business events that relate to business processes, not unlike business activity monitoring.

Standards

; Distributed Management Task Force

Academic preparation

Schools that offer or have offered degrees in the field of systems management include the University of Southern California, the University of Denver, Capitol Technology University, and Florida Institute of Technology.