Time is Money – Photo Courtesy: Tax Credits
Time is money. Do more with less. Rightsizing. Whichever mantra is in vogue, we all know what these really mean. You have more work than ever with even less resources — and less time to get them done!
How can you manage the expectations of your organization’s stakeholders and still work a reasonable amount of hours per week? What about that project that’s been sitting on the back burner? It really needs to be moved to the front burner, but there just isn’t time to get it done.
With the KACE® family of products, you get solutions to automate those tedious tasks — without needing to learn a scripting language. Through a GUI, KACE appliances offer many features to target specific groups of endpoints, automate needed tasks and report on those activities.
Targeting specific groups of endpoints has never been easier. Gone are the days of manually grouping machines or having limited LDAP targets. With the KACE Systems Management Appliance (SMA), there are many ways to target endpoints, the primary being smart labels.
Smart labels allow for precise, advanced targeting of devices based on various attributes of those devices; for example, system name, IP address, software installed, location, architecture or OS. There are more than 200 criteria for filtering devices and any number of custom attributes that you can implement. If you want to target devices only virtual machines, in a certain IP range or named a certain way, the KACE SMA has you covered.
Once those devices are included in a label, you can move to the job that needs to be done, whether it be patching, changing registry keys, adding software or changing configurations. All of these tasks, which are normally completed manually, can be automated through scheduling and smart labels — and save your time. Smart labels automatically target devices that meet predefined criteria, and schedules repeatedly run tasks as needed to complete the desired tasks.
For example, a smart label that looks for machines without a certain piece of software will add them to a scheduled script that removes and replaces said software. The next time the schedule runs, the machines that are up to date are removed from the smart label group, leaving only the ones that haven’t updated yet.
Let’s talk about reporting for a moment. The demand for information can come from many places, such as your boss or even an audit. The bottom line is that you need to be able to complete reports for various stakeholders on various aspects of your endpoints. The report may be something as simple as looking for patching compliance or running a readiness report for an upcoming migration.
Whatever your needs, the KACE SMA can help you easily create and automate those reports. The KACE SMA features a reporting wizard that allows you to customize reports based on your needs. Once created, reports can be set to run on a schedule, then emailed out automatically.
For more advanced reporting needs, the KACE SMA allows back-end access to the SQL database. Custom SQL reports can be crafted as needed. Once completed, these reports can be saved within the KACE SMA and be reused. There are also around 200 built-in reports within the KACE SMA that many people find useful right out of the box.
From top to bottom, the KACE SMA can help manage your endpoints and give you time to get those long forgotten projects back on track. Through advanced device targeting, job automation and precise reporting, the KACE Systems Management Appliance can give you back time in your day. With that extra time, you can do things you want to do instead those things we all have to do.
