Systems management refers to enterprise-wide administration of distributed systems including (and commonly in practice) computer systems. Systems management is strongly influenced by network management initiatives in telecommunications. The application performance management (APM) technologies are now a subset of Systems management. Maximum productivity can be achieved more efficiently through event correlation, system automation and predictive analysis which is now all part of APM.

Centralized management has a time and effort trade-off that is related to the size of the company, the expertise of the IT staff, and the amount of technology being used:

• For a small business startup with ten computers, automated centralized processes may take more time to learn how to use and implement than just doing the management work manually on each computer.
• A very large business with thousands of similar employee computers may clearly be able to save time and money, by having IT staff learn to do systems management automation.
• A small branch office of a large corporation may have access to a central IT staff, with the experience to set up automated management of the systems in the branch office, without need for local staff in the branch office to do the work.

Systems management may involve one or more of the following tasks:

• Hardware inventories.
• Server availability monitoring and metrics.
• Software inventory and installation.
• Anti-virus and anti-malware.
• User's activities monitoring.
• Capacity monitoring.
• Security management.
• Storage management.
• Network capacity and utilization monitoring.
• Anti-manipulation management