Talk:Systems management

Removed References to Commercial Products and Companies
Bardcom 20:53, 25 August 2007 (UTC)
 * Removed listings of commercial products and companies. Listing of selected companies can be seen as representing bias or endorsing more weight on a few "selected' companies.  It's probably best to continue keeping references like this out of the article in order to maintain Wikipedia's Neutral point of view This decision was also taken previously for other articles such as Complex Event Processing and Stream Processing.
 * As policy states, Wikipedia is not a repository for lists, directories or Advocacy of commercial products and/or websites. NPOV requires views to be represented without bias, this applies not only to article text, but to companies, products, external links, and any other material as well. It is not Wikipedia's purpose to include a comprehensive list of companies, products or external links.

Proposed merge
PC Management Software is listed for AFD. Some of its content may be of use in expanding this article. --LesleyW 13:10, 26 December 2005 (UTC)


 * Some info was used to improve the article. — Anrie Nord 16:53, 2 January 2006 (UTC)

Yes! There shouldn't be separate articles for System management and Systems management. This should be fixed asap. johnpseudo 20:17, 27 October 2006 (UTC)

What happened to the proposed merger? Kenavant 18:38, 31 December 2006 (UTC)


 * I think that the System management article may be deleted already, because all the facts are already in the Systems management. I'm not familiar with the deletion policy. Please help me. — Anrie Nord 2007-01-01 15:14Z

BMC PATROL
Please provide additional info about BMC PATROL product such as BMC Software well known customers and technical background (standards and technologies) of this product. Or write an article about this company and product family. — Anrie Nord 15:57, 3 January 2006 (UTC)


 * BMC Patrol is reasonably well-known where I live (Wellington, New Zealand). EDS used it for many years to manage servers, both internally and for customers. I think it's important enough to warrant being listed. --LesleyW 05:51, 4 January 2006 (UTC)

Added freeware link
I've added a link to http://www.lansweeper.com Wikipedia should promote more freeware, system administrators with a limited budget like me will benefit from it.


 * Landsweeper is not a systems management system. It has only some software inventory features. Please categorize this software in another way. — Anrie Nord 2006-09-22 01:03Z

The most known systems and NPOV
Recently Djbclark has changed the article by including some free and open source software links in the beginning. With all respect to the open source movement, the most known systems management systems are proprietary in fact. Djbclark, though I have the software engineering background, I'm familiar with systems and network management stuff. But I've never heard about the tools you mentioned. I suppose those products are not systems management systems, but just configuration management tools. Maybe you could find another place to compare open source and proprietary products, such as list of systems management systems or even better comparison of open source configuration management software. I guess you've already found these ones and made the changes you wanted to.

— Anrie Nord 2007-04-17 22:20Z


 * 1) You have violated the first rule of Resolving disputes; namely ''"Be respectful to others and their points of view. This means primarily: Do not simply revert changes in a dispute. When someone makes an edit you consider biased or inaccurate, improve the edit, rather than reverting it."..
 * 2) What is the basis for the statement "most known systems management systems are proprietary"? I've personally only vaguely heard of most of the proprietary projects you mention, and the standards are even more arcane. "cfengine" gives about 1 million hits on Google, whereas ""bmc patrol" gives only 150k. Cfengine, bcfg2, and puppet are regularly written about in professional System Administration journals such as ;Login: and magazines such as "Sys Admin", whereas I can not recall any of the other projects being mentioned. IBM, CA, etc. have near zero participation in LISA, the largest system administration conference in the world.
 * 3) You need to find a credible source that states what "system management" means and how it differs from "configuration management".
 * 4) If you want to keep the article as-is, I would be fine with it being renamed "proprietary systems management systems" or something like that.
 * 5) I am going to mark the article as under dispute. To avoid an edit war I will not re-revert the changes, and I ask that you follow wikipedia policy and not remove the dispute tag until we have reached a resolution.

These are the disputed changes.

— Djbclark 23:02, 17 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Yes, I've violated WP:DR policy, I'm sorry for that. The definition of systems management is given in the joint ITU-T and ISO/IEC X.200 standard:


 * Systems management — functions in the Application Layer related to the management of various OSI resources and their status across all layers of the OSI architecture.


 * It is given in the context of the OSI architecture, but explained in more detail in X.700 series according to the FCAPS framework (see the article we are disputing on). I think the point in our discussion is the domain of systems management. Things you are talking about are more closely related to system administration while the article is about enterprise-wide systems management. Systems management systems usually provide a set of FCAPS functions and are intended to manage the IT infrastructure of an enterprise, while system administration programs carry out some particular function. Please review the article once again, take a closer look at the systems management standards and determine whether they are used in tools you mentioned or just familiar to you. — Anrie Nord (talk • contribs) 2007-04-17 23:37Z

I think the domain comment in prescient. You seem to be operating in the domain of lots of management buzzwords, that requires buy-in to a lot of standards and concepts that are considered worse than useless by many people in the systems management domains I am familiar with; and yet "systems management" is a generic phrase that I would argue people looking in an encyclopedia as "Managing Systems".

In particular the phrase "manage the IT infrastructure of an enterprise" is itself POV, because it assumes that this topic is only of interest to large companies. "Enterprise" is a nebulous word that has very little information content; do you mean "scales to X number of systems" or "can configure and monitor network devices" or something else? How would the reader know? In any case by using the word "enterprise" we have defined a subset of problems in the systems management arena, not the entire arena. The article is not "Enterprise systems management".

I think the easiest way to resolve this would be to rename the article and/or otherwise indicate that (a) the article is about software that claims to implement a set of FCAPS functions (thus objectively eliminating most/all of the FLOSS software), (b) describe in plain English how software that implements FCAPS functions differs from software that doesn't do this, (c) give a reference to each listed piece of software that indicates implementing FCAPS functions is an aim of the software, and (d) indicate that there are other domains of people/software interested in systems management that do not buy in to any/many of the standards listed on the page.

— Djbclark 00:22, 18 April 2007 (UTC)

I've been working in systems management software development for almost ten years, and I'd have to agree that the most popular, widely adopted systems management software solutions are the closed source solutions provided by major corporations, such as IBM's Tivoli (or Director), Microsoft's Systems Management Server and HP's Open View. I would say those are the major ones. The rest... well...  not so much. - Plakskull 18:18, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

A red link is referred to....
the following http://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_q=systematic+management&num=10&btnG=Search+Scholar&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&as_occt=title&as_sauthors=&as_publication=&as_ylo=&as_yhi=&as_allsubj=all&hl=en --222.64.223.131 (talk) 09:24, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

Nerd alert
This article is written from a computer/IT perspective only. Systems management is a whole field of managing different systems. Computer infrastructure is only one of these fields. The article should at least make mention of this. 83.86.4.72 (talk) 11:49, 15 June 2011 (UTC)


 * In computing "system(s) management" is a commonly used expression. Do you know of other areas where this expression is used (as commonly as in computing)? I'd be happy to hear about it - especially as what you say is mentioned in the introduction - please include it in the article if so. --Alien4 (talk) 12:54, 17 April 2015 (UTC)