Lights-Out IT Management refers to the automation of both problem identification and problem resolution. The successful implementation of Lights-Out IT Management is built upon an integrated system that provides three key management functions: find, configure, and monitor.

• Find: In large IT organizations, tracking all of the components of the IT infrastructure (networking equipment, servers, storage, applications, etc) manually is both time consuming and error prone. At bare minimum, you need the ability to automatically discover all of your IT infrastructure elements.
  
• Configure: IT organizations are continually changing their processes, so to keep up you need the ability to configure a wide range of devices using a broad range of approaches.
  
• Monitor: monitoring can be done either passively or actively. Both approaches have pros and cons and in an effective implementation you're going to utilize both.
  

Read this whitepaper to learn how a lights-out IT management approach to automating network management can help your organization continue to provide new value added services and applications.