Systems Management - Functions

Functions

Functional groups are provided according to International Telecommunication Union Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) Common management information protocol (X.700) standard. This framework is also known as Fault, Configuration, Accounting, Performance, Security (FCAPS).

Fault management

• Troubleshooting, error logging and data recovery

Configuration management

• Hardware and software inventory

• As we begin the process of automating the management of our technology, what equipment and resources do we have already?
• How can this inventorying information be gathered and updated automatically, without direct hands-on examination of each device, and without hand-documenting with a pen and notepad?
• What do we need to upgrade or repair?
• What can we consolidate to reduce complexity or reduce energy use?
• What resources would be better reused somewhere else?
• What commercial software are we using that is improperly licensed, and either needs to be removed or more licenses purchased?

• Provisioning

• What software will we need to use in the future?
• What training will need to be provided to use the software effectively?

• Software deployment

• What steps are necessary to install it on perhaps hundreds or thousands of computers?

• Package management

• How do we maintain and update the software we are using, possibly through automated update mechanisms?

Accounting management

• Billing and statistics gathering

Performance management

• Software metering

• Who is using the software and how often?
• If the license says only so many copies may be in use at any one time but may be installed in many more places than licensed, then track usage of those licenses.
• If the licensed user limit is reached, either prevent more people from using it, or allow overflow and notify accounting that more licenses need to be purchased.

• Event and metric monitoring

• How reliable are the computers and software?
• What errors or software bugs are preventing staff from doing their job?
• What trends are we seeing for hardware failure and life expectancy?

Security management

• Identity management
• Policy 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:

• Business Impact functions (also known as Business Systems Management)
• Capacity management
• Real-time Application Relationship Discovery (which supports Configuration Management)
• Security Information and Event Management functions (SIEM)
• Workload scheduling

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 (OI) which focuses on real-time monitoring of business events that relate to business processes, not unlike business activity monitoring (BAM).