Many IT administrators are buried under an avalanche of management data from an abundance of hardware and software products across their enterprise. The challenge is to collect, manage and synthesize it all.

The information is produced to warn, inform or alert someone in the organization about a situation in the IT infrastructure. In addition, different people in the organization need different information to do their jobs. For example, business information is generated for the line-of-business manager, a high-level view of IT’s service levels is presented to the chief information officer, and device information is provided for the network administrator. Plus, the software and hardware generate even more data for their own specific purposes.

Finding nuggets of useful information in these logs full of data isn’t always so easy -- and if easy ways of sorting out the data aren’t provided, chances are that much of the data will go untouched. This is a shame, considering that the logs contain clues about what is going on -- they could tell you which hardware is reliable or point to an intruder attempting to break into the system, for instance.

Many products provide ways to handle information. Some filter out the extraneous data, using techniques such as event correlation, message filtering, and so forth. Other products have built-in intelligence to dynamically display the information that is most relevant to the task. There are also data-mining tools that can synthesize the information. In other cases, all it takes is pulling together related information from various sources to make it easier for an administrator to diagnose a problem. All of these techniques help make the data useful.

Ideally, you want your enterprise’s management tools to be integrated, but unfortunately, this is not always the case. Enterprise Management Associates recently conducted a study of management tool integration, and found that BMC Patrol users were distinctive, because they are very satisfied with the flexibility and ability of Patrol to integrate management information delivered to and from other sources.

Another interesting way of displaying management information from multiple sources is using a management portal. The management information can be pulled from different tools for display purposes, but the portal itself can’t typically synthesize the information. Synthesis requires integration of the tools.

Finally, be aware that there are different levels of integration. A vendor may say that its tool is integrated with other products, but it may only be integrated at the graphical user interface level (that is, the tool can be launched by clicking an icon on the other product’s GUI.) In this case, the management data is not integrated, but still remains separate, which is not very useful.

As you select more management tools to implement, check whether it integrates with the products you already have installed. Then check on the level of integration. Or look for products that can help to integrate the incompatible management data sources you already have.

» posted by ITworld staff

Network World

• Email
• Print
• Share
  • Slashdot
  • Digg
  • Stumble
  • Reddit
  • Newsvine