Digital tools are now widespread, pervasive and indispensable in every application context and the management activities of an IT infrastructure are increasing, in order to best meet every need and ensure efficiency and rapid response times.
In this context, even small details and the use of the right automation tools can make a huge difference, on the one hand to improve the user experience, on the other hand to make IT admins’ operations ever simpler, faster and effective in terms of time and savings in management costs.
In this article and the next ones of this series we’ll challenge you to become a ThinMan Genius! We’ll share with you some “tricks of the trade” for using the many features offered by ThinMan, both to optimize the common management of workstations and to easily solve some more specific management problems.
Automate the devices’ switching off/on
If the “power management” (consumption management and device power supply) could be considered a secondary aspect, now it could have become the first point on which to intervene to optimize your IT infrastructure and activate important savings in live management costs, significantly reducing electric energy consumption.
ThinMan allows to quickly reconfigure hundreds and thousands of devices, with a few clicks, by changing the “power management” parameters (eg standby times), but it can also automatically control the switching off of devices.
“Power” actions can in fact be programmed with Scheduled Activities refined as desired, for example starting from a weekly programming (shutdown before the weekend), up to daily and personalized activities for the different groups of devices, by controlling switch-ons and shutdowns at different times for individual offices or departments.
In fact, in order not to impact on the efficiency of the employees, it’s also possible to “schedule” the PowerOn (or restart) of all those devices which, like the Praim thin clients, allow Wake on LAN (WoL), regardless of how the infrastructure is distributed. Through the ThinMan Gateway functionality (included in the Network+ Feature Pack), ThinMan allows to manage switch-ons even in remote offices, where the devices are on a different sub-network.
Set activities on event
In addition to scheduled activities, those that allow to program repeated actions (such as switching off/on) or scheduled one-off actions (such as a massive update), ThinMan also offers the possibility to perform some actions only after certain events and, if necessary, to ensure that the activity is carried out at most once.
This can be the best way to make sure that some updates, a command or the installation of new software are applied when a device is restarted, without interfering with the work of your colleagues, or even to link multiple actions together, taking advantage of an event triggered by other previous actions. These actions can also be targeted to specific devices or groups or generalized. It’s also possible to perform tasks only for new devices, those that were not previously included in the management of ThinMan.
