1. Implement Systems Management to Improve Availability and Visibility
Without sound systems management practices, you don’t control outages, they control you.
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2. Introduction
End the vicious cycle of firefighting by establishing greater visibility and control of critical systems.
This Research Is Designed For:
This Research Will Help You:
Infrastructure managers responsible for meeting uptime and availability requirements in critical systems
Infrastructure managers who need to implement tools and processes to monitor and manage critical systems
Establish unified service and system metrics to ensure critical systems are available when needed.
Ensure the right skills and processes are in place for proactive systems management and monitoring.
Formalize systems management objectives and procedures.
Evaluate and select the best systems management solution for your organization.
If optimization is more appropriate for your maturity level, see Info-Tech’s Optimize Systems Management to Improve IT Resilience and Proactivity blueprint.

3. Executive Summary Situation Complication Solution
You experience an unacceptable level of planned and unplanned outages because approach to managing systems is reactive. It is too difficult to reliably predict uptime. IT is losing credibility with stakeholders.
The IT environment has grown increasingly complex. You need to rein in complexity and handle it centrally. Admin wants reliable data in one place and a strategy for making use of that data.
Complication
You want to implement systems management but are unsure how to do so in a resource-challenged environment. You need to determine the key areas to focus on and the tools, processes, and practices needed to create a sustainable systems management program.
Solution
Build your systems management approach around two overarching KPIs that deliver the most measurable value:
Reduce unplanned downtime.
Reduce effort to resolve issues (measured in IT staff hours).
Implement a systems management solution in a five-step process:
Establish systems management priorities to ground your business case.
Assess current systems management capabilities to identify opportunities and challenges.
Develop a systems management project plan.
Evaluate and select systems management tools.
Deploy the systems management solution.

4. Key Insights
Invest in Managing Systems vs. Managing Issues and Problems
Systems management is a key part of the virtuous cycle of getting IT out of “firefighter” mode.
Every IT department does systems management, even if only ad hoc or informally. This blueprint will help you make more productive use of time and effort you already spend managing systems and problems.
The cost of not improving systems management includes the cumulative cost of the inability to undertake ongoing IT improvement projects due to the constant need to put out fires.
Understand Your Real Priorities
You probably don’t know what your real priorities are until you create a baseline and visualize real or estimated performance and criticality.
No service or system can perform better than its weakest component.
Clearly identifying weak links leads to:
Faster root cause analysis
More unified effort to improve performance
More realistic SLAs and clearer stakeholder expectations
Organizations waste effort maintaining systems and components that aren’t critical.
In some cases it’s better to let staff continue with project work rather than react to failure of a non-critical component.
Effective prioritization of components requires analyzing dependencies in order to assess criticality to business functions with real costs.
Technology Won’t Solve All Your Problems
Don’t be seduced by the promise of managing everything on a single pane of glass. Systems management suites are difficult and costly to implement. Many organizations are better suited to a multi-tool approach, with a unified monitoring solution laid over specialized tools deployed to manage specific technologies.
Any attempt at creating a unified solution across silos will face some resistance. People might feel threatened and exposed, and might question the motives for monitoring how “their” systems are performing. These concerns should be allayed once they see the value in having visibility into other systems – and in some cases improved visibility into their own.
Emphasize People and Processes
Organizations and individuals often fall into the trap of fixating on “vanity metrics” – things that are relatively easy to measure and communicate but are ultimately less valuable than other KPIs.
Organizations that don’t measure uptime and performance against documented targets don’t know how big the gaps really are.

5. How to use this blueprint
There are multiple ways you can use this Info-Tech Best-Practice Blueprint in your organization. Choose the option that best fits your needs:
Do-It-Yourself Best-Practice Toolkit
Onsite
Workshops
Free Guided
Implementation
Do-It-Yourself Implementation
Use this Best-Practice Blueprint to help you complete your project. The slides in this Blueprint will walk you step-by-step through every phase of your project with supporting tools and templates ready for you to use.
Project Accelerator Workshop
You can also use this Best-Practice Blueprint to facilitate your own project accelerator workshop within your organization using the workshop slides and facilitation instructions provided in the Appendix.
We recommend that you supplement the Best-Practice Blueprint with a Guided Implementation.
For most Info-Tech members, these Guided Implementations are included in your membership plan.* Our expert analysts will provide telephone assistance to you and your team at key project milestones to review your materials, answer your questions, and explain our methodology.
Info-Tech Research Group’s expert analysts will come onsite to help you work through our project methodology in a 2-5 day project accelerator workshop. We take you through every phase of the project and ensure that you have a road map in place to complete your project successfully. In some cases, we can even complete the project while we are onsite.
Book your workshop now by ing:
*Gold and Silver level subscribers only
Or calling:
Ext. 3001

6. Make the case Define systems management Scope your project
Benefits of systems management
Systems management challenges and pitfalls
Make the case
Analyze priorities and challenges
Decide on goals, solutions, and next steps
Implement processes and tools
Workshop deck

7. Systems management is a holistic combination of infrastructure and service management disciplines
Every IT department does systems management, even if only in an ad hoc, informal, or ineffective fashion.
“Systems management is the activity of identifying and integrating various products and processes in order to provide a stable and responsive IT environment.”
- Rich Scheisser, IT Systems Management (2010)
Topics not covered in this blueprint:
Desktop Management
Capacity Planning
Systems Management Optimization
This blueprint specifically covers the following four disciplines under the systems management umbrella:
Incident Management (event management, failure-recovery, etc.)
Problem Management (root cause analysis, etc.)
Availability Management (pinging services to check availability to end users or other services, alerting, etc.)
Performance Management (performance testing and tuning, identifying bottlenecks, etc.)
Configuration Management (discovery of network devices and data center components, network topology, etc.)
Related sets:
Optimize Systems Management to Improve IT Resilience and Proactivity
Ensure Service Delivery with Systems Management
Maximize Availability for Mission Critical Systems
Take Control of Infrastructure Metrics
This blueprint will help you make better use of time and effort you already spend managing systems.

8. This blueprint will help organizations implement systems management capabilities where they don’t already exist
Info-Tech has developed two individual projects tailored to specific sets of systems management challenges.
Implement
Optimize
Low systems management maturity
No unified technology solution (potential solution might be deployed for limited use, but it has not been identified as a unified solution)
No documented processes
No dedicated role
Mid-high systems management maturity
Unified technology solution is in place (not necessarily used for all functions)
Some processes are documented
Role exists (not necessarily FTE)
Select and deploy the right tool
Leverage and optimize a tool in use
Establish unified metrics and KPIs
Consolidate unified metrics and KPIs
Focus on monitoring processes
Focus on resolution and tuning processes
Not ready for automation or predictive analytics
Require and ready for automation and predictive analytics

9. Systems management provides measurable value through increased infrastructure availability and visibility
Deliver real, measurable value using Info-Tech’s systems management implementation methodology.
Reduce unplanned downtime
Business value: Ultimately the business needs systems available at the right times, not all the time.
IT value: Improving your ability to plan and control downtime will help increase trust in IT through better stakeholder management.
Improve
Availability
Reduce effort to resolve issues (measured in IT staff time)
Business value: Decreases the cost of system failures in terms of lowering hours spent as well as lost productivity.
IT value: Decreases the impact of system disruptions on the IT organization (especially management) will enable you to progress from constant firefighting to continuous innovation.
Improve Visibility

10. Case study: Systems management helps XYZ Corp
Case study: Systems management helps XYZ Corp. break the vicious IT firefighting cycle
Systems management helps IT proactively identify issues and problems before they become major disruptions.
Situation
The IT organization is undertaking a large-scale service management initiative to improve IT’s relationships and standing with the business.
A week-long series of meetings was scheduled to kick-start the service management initiative.
Challenge
During the first afternoon of meetings, a series of service disruptions started and key members of the infrastructure management team had to step out.
Issues persisted through the second day and the infrastructure team was absorbed in identifying the root cause of the issues.
Actions
A decision was made to establish improved monitoring processes and tools to deal more efficiently with issues and problems before tackling more ambitious performance and service management.
Outcome
A year later a similar event occurred. Except this time fewer infrastructure team members were required to identify the root cause much sooner using the unified monitoring solution.
As a result of increased systems management discipline, the IT management team now has more time to invest in continuous improvements that help IT create value with the business.

11. To successfully establish systems management, there are three key challenges that are overcome with sound processes
Systems management is a complex, substantial undertaking.
Typical challenges and pitfalls:
“A lot of what we’ve encountered is a learning curve and maturity curve.”
Neglecting to define clear objectives: Systems management can simply become one more thing to manage. Guide the implementation with clear objectives and rationale.
Setting unrealistic SLAs: Publishing SLAs before unified monitoring and management are established is setting yourself up for failure. Measure performance to establish a realistic baseline before setting targets.
Betting on technology to be the ideal solution: Trying to tailor a process to a tool won’t work. Select a tool specifically suited to your environment, operating procedures, and defined objectives.
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Identify and focus on priorities rather than trying to do too much.
Assess not just current but future needs to ensure processes and tools are adopted and improved over the long term.
Throwing money at this problem and only buying a solution is not effective. Good organizational processes and commitment (continuous buy-in) are key to effective systems management.

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