Must-have tech for total IT system management

Davis + Henderson, founded in 1875 as a cheque printing firm, now provides back-end software and services for Canadian financial institutions. Most of its internal software is developed in-house and not purchased off-the-shelf.

“It becomes extremely difficult to keep your eye on all those things without some kind of electronic eyes,” said Mark Bryant, Toronto-based Davis + Henderson’s director of technology operations.

This electronic set of eyes is just one aspect of systems management, which encompasses a wide variety of software and services, including patch management, asset management and alerting tools that help keep servers, networks, enterprise applications and workstations running properly.

While software agents that track specific servers, network hardware and other devices have been around for decades, several vendors have recently developed more sophisticated systems that can trace the root cause of specific problems and predict the effect an outage or slowdown can have on specific business services. Davis + Henderson uses four of the Unicenter-brand software tools, manufactured by Islandia, N.Y.-based CA Inc., formerly known as Computer Associates International.

Get back to your roots

The company uses CA’s Asset Management, which includes automated discovery, hardware and software inventory, software usage monitoring and licence management. It also uses CA Distributed Software Management and Service Desk, plus Network and Systems Management (NSM). NSM is designed to identify and predict problems as well as help IT managers decide what takes the highest priority according to its potential impact on business.

“It allows my guys to action something before it becomes a problem,” Bryant said, adding Unicenter helps him monitor the use of memory, central processing units and disks. “If it fails, we can write a script to have it restart.”

When an IT-driven service fails, determining the root cause is a “significant challenge,” said Brant Hanbury, IBM Canada Inc.’s Tivoli national brand manager. Business Service Manager, which is part of the Tivoli IT Service Management product line, includes auto-discovery, a Web console and a graphical view of applications. It is targeted at executives who want a “dashboard” view of their systems and is designed for non-IT business managers, Hanbury said.

The Tivoli service level advisor is “essentially the same thing” as BSM, Hanbury said, but it provides a different view of the same information. Service level advisor lets IT managers define service level agreements with a wizard, and can evaluate them as often as every hour. It is designed to let IT departments fix problems before they occur. “

Many clients look to end-user monitoring tools to give them an indication of why clients are not receiving adequate service,” said Cameron Haight, research vice-president for the Gartner Group Inc., a Stamford, Conn.-based market research firm. “They are the canary in the coal mine.”

Systems management tools today are “more tightly coupled to the services they’re trying to deliver,” than they were in the past, said Darin Stahl, lead analyst at London, Ont.-based Info-Tech Research Group.

Seek the single pane of glass

Over time, IT managers tend to buy a variety of tool sets from different vendors, all which give information on different parts of the IT infrastructure, but not with a bird’s-eye view. The holy grail of systems management is a “single pane of glass” that will give users an overall view of their system from end to end, Stahl said.