Although occasionally deployed as a simple and robust application
user environment, COSduty-SSA is most often used to support, monitor
and manage the work of the staff who run IT services in enterprises
having an infrastructure of Unix, Linux and Windows systems. Within
IT services they have roles in operations, production, system
engineering, system administration and management.
COSduty-SSA operates in three broad functional areas:
Operations automation featuring duty scheduling and runbook
support
Privileged user (system administrator) management
Password vault (secure password management)
All the functions of COSduty-SSA are accessible from a common
environment whose appearance and behaviour are determined by the
OSM Toolset — a substantial library of software tools engineered
to support the user interface, data management and inter-module
communications.
The OSM toolset
In standard Unix and Linux environments, the staff who operate,
administer and manage systems must possess exceptional
competence so as to be able to use the command-line user interface
safely and efficiently. One of the functions of the OSM Toolset
is to allow command scripts of any complexity to be captured and
made executable from a GUI which additionally supports fine-grained access
control.
The OSM Toolset therefore comprises a number of graphical user
interface tools including a menu builder, a forms generator and
a collection of related tools for displaying and managing data.
To support system data extraction and manipulation as well
as querying and display, there is a behaviourally relational database
which allows system files to be incorporated within its
structure. Virtual
database tables may be manipulated by means of several Toolset
commands. Activity and transaction logging processes are used
to create a reviewable audit trail of all system management activity.
The OSM Toolset also contains a number of communication methods,
including some with built-in encryption. They may be used either
without modification or supplemented by methods favoured by the
local IT service.
The power of modules constructed from the OSM Toolset comes
from the fact that
the technology simplifies the capture of knowledge, possibly already
documented in the form of written procedures containing preferred
practice, then helps manage its subsequent use. Due to the fine-grained
access control mechanism, procedures may be delegated precisely
to the appropriate individual or role for execution — operations,
systems administration, configuration engineering, help-desk,
etc.
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