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Pre-Engagement Questionnaire, [Type Subject Here], Version .1 Draft
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“VisionScope" last modified on 5 Jun. 14, Rev 3

Update [Customer Name] in Doc Properties

Table of Contents

1 Introduction 5

2 ITSM Processes 5

2.1 Sample Questions 5

3 Infrastructure and Application Monitoring 6

3.1 Sample Questions 6

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Pre-Engagement Questionnaire, [Type Subject Here], Version .1 Draft
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Update [Customer Name] in Doc Properties

1  Introduction

This document provides the set of information that is required for scoping and defining a engagement that is providing a monitoring solution based on Microsoft® System Center 2012 R2 – Operations Manager. It is intended to guide the consultant through the discovery of this information, and it provides a set of sample questions for an interview with a customer. Of course, this set of questions is meant only as a basis for discussion, and it is assumed that the consultant will continue to gather any required information relating to the unique conditions of each customer and project.

2  ITSM Processes

To configure role-based security, notifications, and establish processes for alert handling, authoring, and administration, the customer’s current support organization and processes must be understood. Microsoft System Center 2012 - Operations Manager may provide features that support the implementation of new processes, but the existing processes and tools should at least be understood for a starting point.

2.1  Sample Questions

·  How many support organizations are there, what locations are they in, and what are their responsibilities?

·  If a problem is detected with an IT/Business service or component of that service, whose responsibility is it to respond to the problem? The answer may be different for different groups of services. Is the escalation process based on functional or hierarchical escalation?

·  Who is responsible for the analysis of desktop and client application reliability? Do they have any existing tools to perform a reliability analysis of their applications?

·  What is the escalation process when a particular support group cannot correct a problem?

·  Is there a centralized and authoritiative knowledge base that is provided to the organization? If yes, can you provide some details such as:

o  Is it actively maintained and kept up-to-date?

o  Is it centrally managed/updated or does anyone have the rights to modify/add knowledge articles or documentation to this repository?

o  What type of information is maintained?

o  What product or platform is hosting it?

·  Are there any defined notification requirements?

·  Are there service level agreements in place? How are they currently measured and reported?

·  Are there any operating level agreements in place between the different groups in the IT organization? How are they currently measured and reported?

·  Is there an existing enterprise event monitoring solution currently deployed? If so, which product (vendor and product name, including version) and are you planning on having Operations Manager replace or compliment it?

·  What ITSM service desk solution is currently deployed (vendor and product name, including version)? Are you looking to integrate Operations Manager with this solution?

·  What reporting or dashboards are provided to the different support teams (and NOC if applicable) and what type of metrics are included?

·  Is automation in-place today for certain events or exceptions that are detected by the monitoring solution to auto-remediate?

3  Infrastructure and Application Monitoring

It is critical to understand what datacenter infrastructure services and applications the customer is using that requires monitoring. This will help define what features of Operations Manager will be utilized, such as network device monitoring, application performance monitoring, and what management packs will need to be imported and customized in order to improve infrastructure and application availability.

Be careful not to imply any commitments at this stage. Any custom development has the greatest potential to increase the scope of this engagement.

3.1  Sample Questions

·  Approximately how many systems are running Microsoft Windows Server that are in-scope for monitoring? What versions are they?

·  Approximately how many systems are running UNIX/Linux that are in-scope for monitoring? What commercial or enterprise distribution is deployed and what versions are they?

·  If clients are being monitored, what is the approximate mix of Windows® XP, and Microsoft Windows 7® operating systems running on clients? What versions of Microsoft Office are in use?

·  What is the structure of the Microsoft Active Directory®?

·  What is the forest and domain structure?

·  Will monitoring Windows sytems outside the forest Operations Manager is installed in a requirement?

·  Does an existing Certificate infrastructure exist?

·  What are the number and locations of the domain controllers?

·  What other Microsoft applications are in use? What are their roles? How many servers are there?

Examples include Microsoft SQL Server®, Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS), Microsoft BizTalk® Server, and Microsoft SharePoint®.

·  What major non-Microsoft applications are in use that require monitoring?

Examples include Oracle applications, IBM Lotus Notes, BlackBerry, and SAP software.

·  Are these being monitored by other monitoring solutions?

·  What major business services require monitoring?

·  What is the basic structure of each one? Note: This should not include a detailed discussion of the application architecture. At this stage, simply defining the major components that the application is based on is sufficient. An example is a Microsoft .NET application with front-end Web servers communicating with a SQL Server database.

·  Who is responsible for them?

·  What is the business impact of their downtime? Note: This should not be a marketing discussion about the value of Operations Manager. This information is used to prioritize the work for developing custom monitoring solutions for these applications.

·  Are network devices currently being monitored? What specifically is monitored and how?

·  What is the relationship between the group that is monitoring network devices and the other groups that are responsible for managing/supporting IT/business services?

·  What software is currently in use to manage network devices?

·  When an incident impacting availability of an IT/business service caused by a network device or network link down, was it immediately clear?

·  Does your service desk or network operations center understand the relationships and dependencies of network devices on IT/business services so they can easily identify, understand impact, and appropriately escalate?

·  Is the business trying to integrate the alerts/tickets into the existing Service Desk tool?

·  Have application models or service maps been created illustrating the various components and dependencies representing the IT/business service?

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Pre-Engagement Questionnaire, [Type Subject Here], Version .1 Draft
Prepared by Author
“VisionScope.docx" last modified on 5 Jun. 14, Rev 3