Oracle Magazine - January/February 2011

ANALYST’S CORNER B Y DAVID BAUM
The Case for Integrated
Systems Management
Efficient and cost-effective systems management
must also do more.

Oracle Magazine spoke with Tim Grieser, program vice president of enterprise system management software at International Data Corporation (IDC), about managing enterprise information systems in an era of outsourcing, virtualization, and cloud computing.

Oracle Magazine: What is driving I T organizations to adopt integrated systems management solutions?

Grieser: Reducing the cost of operations is the #1 concern of today’s I T managers. Improving customer satisfaction levels is a close second.

I T departments face a dichotomy between trying to simplify operations while continually improving service levels. Systems management software can increase the efficiency of the I T staff and also reduce operational costs. Traditionally, I T departments have relied on a variety of tools from multiple vendors to manage various parts of the IT infrastructure. Third-party tools are not intrinsically integrated, which means I T must manually integrate them or hire a service organization to do it for them. It’s not easy to monitor the entire infrastructure when you have to start with different components, interfaces, management agents, philosophies, and so forth and then pool it all into a common framework or manually combine the information. Having a preintegrated toolset with common interfaces and common views saves the I T organization the time and expense of making the tools work together. Oracle Magazine: What are the key goals and challenges in enterprisewide systems monitoring? Grieser: It’s important to have an end-to-end picture of the IT infrastructure in order to make sure that end users are receiving the overall services they need. But doing this reliably becomes more difficult as information systems and IT functions get distributed, virtualized, and outsourced.

In a virtualized environment, an application or business process can span many different servers, some of which may be hosted by third parties. This is especially the case when you have a multitier or composite application in which the database is on one server,

You need to be
able to monitor and
manage service
levels from end
to end.

the applications are somewhere else, the Web
server is somewhere else, and so on. Even if
each tier appears to be functioning well, there
is no guarantee that users will receive ade-
quate service levels when their transactions
cross tiers. You need to be able to monitor
and manage service levels from end to end.
Oracle Magazine: How do you measure the
results of integrated systems management?
Grieser: You need to be able to see business
metrics in addition to I T metrics so you can
relate what’s going on in the infrastructure
to the actual response time users experi-
ence. That means having a set of systems
management tools that monitors the entire
IT environment from the disk drive all the
way up to the user interface, sometimes
called “application-to-disk management.”
The objective is to understand not just the
technical transactions that are going on but
also the service levels that people are getting.
Isolated IT metrics don’t really tell you much
about the overall health of an application
or the business impact of certain problems.
If the IT staff can’t judge performance and
troubleshoot problems at the business level,
then they won’t have the correct business
context for addressing issues and prioritizing
their management activities. For example,
a line-of-business owner is concerned
with fulfilling orders on time, while IT is
concerned about technical metrics such as
application uptime and server utilization.
Oracle Magazine: Why is it important to inte-
grate systems management and customer
support functions?
Grieser: When system administrators resolve
application issues, I T operations staff may
need to route service requests to their IT
vendors. Many of today’s systems manage-
ment tools don’t supply basic information
such as version numbers, configuration
settings, and applied patches. Thus it takes
longer to resolve problems because you have
to wait for the vendor to gather those specs.
Some vendors provide automated channels
for providing software patches and updates,
and the information is accessible from
within the enterprise systems management
console. It’s much easier to resolve problems
if you can integrate the systems manage-
ment and support functions in this way. 

David Baum ( david@dbaumcomm.com) is a freelance business writer based in Santa Barbara, California.

IDC ( idc.com) is a global provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the information technology, telecommunications, and consumer technology markets.