The systems administrator must be equipped to report availability and performance metrics based on business transactions rather than technical IT based transactions.
The risks associated with these challenges can be mitigated with strong planning and a commitment to continuing the evolution in systems management. IT groups have been committed to ITIL and have been investing in populating configuration management databases to document hardware, software and network configurations. The time and effort to build and maintain these databases has been significant.
The role of the systems administrator has grown in complexity as application systems have become increasingly more complicated. Historically, a system administrator managed application and DBMS servers that were usually collocated. Today, the challenges have increased with:
- Security servers to protect transactions and data
- Complex business transactions architected with services executing in remote data centers
- 24/7 operations schedules to serve clients around the world
- Service level agreements requiring 100% availability
- Client demands to report availability and performance statistics based on business transactions rather than technical IT based transactions.
The risks associated with these challenges can be mitigated with strong planning and a commitment to continuing the evolution in systems management. IT groups have been committed to ITIL and have been investing in populating configuration management databases to document hardware, software and network configurations. The time and effort to build and maintain these databases has been significant.
Looking into the future, the need to rapidly detect the software, hardware and network configurations that an application is executing in real time is growing in importance. Once the value is fully understood, the real-time detection of infrastructure and application software will be the next evolution in systems management.
As a system administrator, you can choose to follow trends or lead in the delivery of enhanced systems management with real-time detection.
SharePath has the ability for real time detection today. Learn more about SharePath and SharePath Real User Measurements at the Products page.
