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
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- Troubleshooting, error logging and data recovery
- Configuration management
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- Hardware and software inventory
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- 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
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- What software will we need to use in the future?
- What training will need to be provided to use the software effectively?
- Software deployment
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- What steps are necessary to install it on perhaps hundreds or thousands of computers?
- Package management
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- How do we maintain and update the software we are using, possibly through automated update mechanisms?
- Accounting management
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- Billing and statistics gathering
- Performance management
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- Software metering
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- 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
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- 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
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- 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).
Read more about this topic: Systems Management
Famous quotes containing the word functions:
“Those things which now most engage the attention of men, as politics and the daily routine, are, it is true, vital functions of human society, but should be unconsciously performed, like the corresponding functions of the physical body.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“If photography is allowed to stand in for art in some of its functions it will soon supplant or corrupt it completely thanks to the natural support it will find in the stupidity of the multitude. It must return to its real task, which is to be the servant of the sciences and the arts, but the very humble servant, like printing and shorthand which have neither created nor supplanted literature.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“When Western people train the mind, the focus is generally on the left hemisphere of the cortex, which is the portion of the brain that is concerned with words and numbers. We enhance the logical, bounded, linear functions of the mind. In the East, exercises of this sort are for the purpose of getting in tune with the unconscious—to get rid of boundaries, not to create them.”
—Edward T. Hall (b. 1914)