Ya know, if there is one thing I have long been perplexed about it is this: Systems Management tools seem to be much more complicated than necessary. I have worked with Tivoli since 1997. The GUI hasn't (for the most part) changed since then and back then it was pathetic. That's another post altogether, though.
It seemed that you needed a good, highly qualified technical team just to "Manage the Manager", if you will. One company I contracted with had a team of four members to manage Tivoli Software Distribution, Inventory, Framework and Remote Control. Note: This team didn't actually provide these services, they just made sure the parts under the hood were working. No Software Distribution packages were actually being built, no useful data from Inventory was actually being provided, etc. They basically worked full time to make sure the Managed Node servers were communicating with the TMR and that the Tivoli endpoints (TMA) were actually communicating properly with their respective Gateways.
This company had pumped an exorbitant amount of financial and personnel resources into a Tivoli solution. When I arrived the company was about to "Scrap" the whole thing and move to Microsoft SMS 2.0. They asked me why Tivoli seemed to be so "useless". I told them that I have seen Tivoli make it Rain and I have seen it make it Pain. I actually used this line a lot when I taught Tivoli courses in 1999. This company has since changed their tone on Tivoli. We made it into a highly utilized solution by making it much more user friendly. We wrote a web front end for it. We offered the basic functionality that Tivoli provided (using the Tivoli internals) but we made it intuitive to the 180 Administrators who needed the functionality that Tivoli was supposed to provide. Instead of an Administrator having to figure out Profile Managers and Policy Regions, we mapped the computer hierarchy to Active Directory. We added a very simple SEARCH feature to, you know, find a particular computer. It still amazes me how something as simple as a search feature eludes so many ESM solutions. Trying to "find" a particular computer using native Tivoli or SMS (1.x - 2003) can be a very daunting task. I have managed 15,000 computers with SMS 2003 and trying to find a computer using that tool can lead me to feelings usually associated with Road Rage.
Anyway, I have learned that many ESM solutions are complicated and clunky to use. I think one of the biggest reasons for this is simple: The ESM solution is trying to be all things to all people. These companies want to compete for the big customers be they private industry or government agencies. No biggie. I think that so much of the Management of computer resources happens at a smaller level. Large companies have administrators that they break down in to departmental groups. Each administrator generally looks after 'x' number of computers or 'y' number of departments. Small to Medium sized businesses (SMB) often have only one administrator for their entire company. These smaller companies are often left out in the cold when it comes to ESM solutions because the perception that these solutions are
Sure if the solution is too difficult to maintain why would you want to tax your already spent administrator on something else? However, if an ESM solution wasn't so damn complicated and expensive it would be nice to allow your administrator to do more with less.
I now work with a product called Admin Arsenal. For the SMB (or an administrator at the "departmental level" of a large company) this tool can alleviate so many "gotchas" that surface in the life of an Administrator.
I will post suggestions\problems and possible solutions for a number of ESM Solutions but you will find that I focus on Admin Arsenal. Why? Simple, we made it to alleviate the problems that come with clunky, hard-to-use, cumbersome and expensive solutions. Shameless promoting? Sure, I have no shame... I lost all that when I started using Tivoli and SMS.
