The Mandate for Lights-Out IT Management

In order to be regarded as being successful, IT organizations must continually provide new value added services and applications. Being able to add these new services and applications is increasingly difficult as the IT environment becomes ever more complex and a growing percentage of the IT organization's resources are consumed just maintaining the existing environment.
 
Automating key network management tasks is one of the steps that IT management can take in order to free up the resources required to develop and implement new services and applications. When evaluating automated management tools, IT organizations should look for:    

• An integrated system that supports find, configure and monitor functions
• Support for a customizable user interface
• Multi-vendor, multi-element, multi-domain support
• Service-level awareness and reporting
• Support for virtualized environments
• Support for physical and logical network topologies and root cause analysis
• Integrated functionality across the Fault, Configuration, Accounting, Performance, Security (FCAPS) model and Service Level Management
• The ability to assist in the rapid creation and/or modification of a service
• Support of a sophisticated CMDB
• A high degree of automation within each function and across functions
• Ease of integration with other network management tools

This Brief-Webcast/podcast combination should most appropriately be considered a powerful, complementary pair as opposed to an "either-or" choice.

• The Mandate for Lights-Out IT Management Conversation
• A Webtorials Conversation
• Webtorials Analyst/Consulting Division cofounder Jim Metzler discusses this topic, joined by Mike Grote of Dorado Software, with Steven Taylor acting as moderator. The conversation is approximately 27 minutes.
• Optimized for Viewing on Computer Screen
• Optimized for Video iPod

• The Mandate for Lights-Out IT Management   
• A Webtorials Analyst Brief
• Download Brief
• (Webtorials membership required. Click here to register or if you forgot your username/password.)

Acknowledgment: Please note that this Webtorials Analysis and Conversation are made possible in part due to the support of Dorado Software.