3rd Grade Kickball and Systems Management: Not much has changed

When it comes to employing Systems Management solutions too many pointy-haired bosses fall into the same trap that the third grade teachers in my elementary school fell into during the Annual Kickball tournament: They got lazy when assigning the "unglamorous" positions.

Kickball in my elementary school was the Bomb. It was THE sport for the boys. We all loved it (except for a kid named Ben who was always hanging around with the girls playing dolls and four-square) and I am sure we all thought we could go pro. My class won the championship. We even beat the older grades. Why? Certainly not because of me. No, the kudos need to go to my teacher, Ned Aikau. He was serious about the game. All the teams had good pitchers and basemen. The throw-away positions were the outfield and, for some reason, Catcher. EVERY other team had a bored girl play catcher. (I should state that playing kickball was pretty much mandatory so all students had to play, even the bored ones). Playing Catcher in elementary kickball is not at all like playing catcher in baseball or softball. Any kid who couldn't kick an oncoming ball had bigger problems to deal with. Anyway, Mr. A took the second best "jock" in the class and made him play catcher. That was Randy. If some baserunner rounded third you could bet Randy was waiting with a smile. He could catch any ball thrown and he would mercilessly throw the ball at the oncoming runner. Mr. A made the only girl who seemed to like sports play Shortstop. He had me play Right Field ( a place where the bored team members usually congregated to talk about anything but the very game they were playing). Every position that was usually given to the bored or throw-away students was given to a capable player. As I mentioned, we won every game.

ESM is often the Catcher position. Management has already purchased data-center servers and had a collective heart attack when funding last OS upgrade. Trying to get them to pay for Systems Management can be pretty dangerous. I actually heard a pointy-haired boss say "I have real issues with paying for tools that make your job easier. With the money we pay you, you should be able to do all this stuff without these expensive purchases". He actually wasn't just speaking to me but to a team of us. I remember one tool I had requested was WinBatch from Wilson WindowWare. I ultimately got the software but I'm still not proud of how low I had to go to get it (yet again, that's another, umm, post or should I say, confession).

Think about the urgent demands that you face every week. Make a list... it might look something like this:

1. "Find all the software is loaded on our company's computers. I heard some company's are getting busted for having pirated software!"
2. "Why the hell are games loaded on our computers? I thought we didn't allow that! Remove the 'games', now."
3. "We have some new time-management software that we need installed on all the company's computers. Ummm, we need it installed now so that we can process all the new timecards in the new system."
4. "I just read an article that said too many users have Administrative permissions on their work computers. Do our users have Administrative permissions?"

That is just a very simple, ordinary list. Whether you are an administrator of 23 or 2300 computers, you have probably had similar demands of you. All four demands are common dilemmas resolved in some fashion by Systems Management. Some administrators use "point solutions" to solve these. Some Administrators use "all-in-one" solutions. And some administrators use self made scripts, GPO's and perhaps a touch of sneaker-net to get the job  done. All four points can be accomplished with Admin Arsenal which is available (at this writing) for about $250.

A well maintained Systems Management environment would be able to fulfill requests 1 & 2 immediately and steps 2 & 4 within a day or two (depending on how much testing you like to run through before uninstalling or installing software.)

If you are storing lists of installed software in an Excel spreadsheet that you maintain then, please, stop. Software in your company is constantly being installed, upgraded, removed or replaced. Trying to keep up with such a dynamic environment with such a static approach will burn you sooner rather than later.

If you have no idea which users have local administrative access to your company's computers then you have a new priority. Actually two. Thumping yourself on the head is the first one. Remedying the situation with a tool (or tools) that provide this data is your second priority.

Installing and removing software across your computing environment is one of the most in-demand tasks asked of administrators. So many applications can easily be installed or removed en-masse that if you still approach these tasks via sneakerNet, then you either need to A) get with the program or B) send me a picture of the boss that denied the purchase of the Software Installation tool. I think I used to work for him.

Some days, I wish my boss was Mr. Aikau. He would expect hard work and competency from the whole team but he would also make the tough call to put a Randy on as Catcher.

ESM Can make it Rain or make it Pain.

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

too expensive

too difficult to maintain (we only have one administrator and he is being worked to the ground as it is)

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.