À la Carte Systems Management

If you asked a child to name someone connected with McDonalds they would probably say Ronald McDonald.  Ask an adult the same question and it’s not unlikely they’d answer Ray Kroc. Certainly, Kroc, with his mantra of “In business for yourself, but not by yourself”, had a key role in spreading McDonalds throughout the world, but he does overshadow the importance of the eponymous McDonald brothers.

Richard and Maurice McDonald’s key insight was that if you need to provide service both fast and well you need to limit the choices available.  Their “Speedee Service System” cut their menu to a simple choice of burgers, fries, drinks and apple pie, and removed carhops, making McDonalds Self-Service.  It was this template for speed and reliability that made the franchise so successful.

Whilst fast food isn’t suitable for every occasion, often we want something we’ve had before and we want it quickly and it’s this market that McDonalds serves well.  This requirement of “the same again and fast” is something everyone has come across, not least in Systems Management.

For a majority of IT Projects the Systems Management requirements are very similar to what has been seen before, and with enabling monitoring often left as afterthought until go-live is fast approaching, speed is always of the essence.  So instead of allowing the Systems Management team to become an oft-criticised bottleneck in deployment we can take the same approach as the McDonalds: allow our customers to select themselves from a core menu of commonly uses services which we can provide quickly and reliably.

This is what the Orb Data Self-Service Portal allows you to do easily.  Administrators define the management capabilities offered to users who can then easily specify their requirements through the web interface.

disk-monitoring

SSP’s interface streamlined and responsive interface presents polished appearance to customers, so where in-house tools may have a “fast food” appearance, SSP offers “À la Carte Systems Management” to users, offering both speed and sophistication.

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Author:

Dave Webb