1.
What does Performance Management architecture mean to you?
a) Performance Management software functionality
b) Specifications of the hardware, the software will run on
c) Software components, their interoperability as an integrated system,
and how the integrated system supports the performance management process
2.
Does your organization have a documented Performance Management architecture
and an implementation roadmap?
a) Ill find it if I look for it
b) Some basic documentation
c) Well-documented architecture and implementation roadmap under Change
Control, blessed by the management
3.
What does Performance Management mean to you?
a) Availability of the network only
b) Perceived response time from a users perspective
c) Both
4.
Do you have a well-defined Performance Management process in place?
a) Yeah, whenever our users/customers have a performance problem, they
call the Help Desk
b) Yeah, the hardware and bandwidth are dirt-cheap. We always buy more
than we need
c) Yeah, the process is documented
5.
Have do you defined the roles and responsibilities of various organizations
in the workflow related to Performance Management process?
a) No
b) We sort of understand our roles
c) Well-documented roles and responsibilities including inter-organization
hand-offs and escalation procedures
6.
Can you map steps in Performance Management process with the associated
systems?
a) No clue what youre talking about
b) Well, I know how to get my performance reports
c) Sure! It is well-documented as part of our end-to-end performance management
process
7.
Does your Performance Management system feed into the following systems?
a) No, what for?
b) Fault Management/Network Monitoring System
c) Capacity Management
8.
Do you have products with overlapping functionality?
a) Some
b) None completely mutually exclusive
c) Few but their roles in the overall architecture are well-defined
9.
How do you manage performance of the underlying infrastructure?
a) Wait for user complaints
b) Wait for an outage event and then get budget to buy more hardware
c) Proactively monitor and identify bottlenecks before they impact users
10.
Do you have a forecasting or trend reporting in place?
a) Not really. We wait for disk full error
b) We apply threshold on various performance related parameters
c) We use thresholds in conjunction with trending analysis
11.
How do you evaluate Performance Management products?
a) Given the economic conditions and influence of corporate procurement,
strictly based on price
b) Technical feature set
c) A combination of vendor viability, our end-to-end infrastructure management
architecture and performance management requirements
12.
How do you know that there is a performance related issue in your infrastructure?
a) Normally, our users call us to let us know
b) There is a threshold trigger event on our network monitoring console
c) The performance issues are identified and addressed proactively based
on thresholds and trending analysis
13.
Do you have systems and processes in place to localize a performance issue?
a) Not really
b) Only by trial and error
c) Yes. Can break it down to various components in service path
14.
Do you monitor applications and servers?
a) Yeah, only availability
b) Process up or down
c) Transaction response times
15.
Have you identified the performance parameters you want to collect and
report upon?
a) A few
b) All threshold parameters
c) All threshold parameters along with collection frequency and aggregation
intervals
16.
Do you use Performance Management reports for?
a) Capacity Planning
b) Managing Service Level Agreements
c) Both
17.
How well have you instrumented your infrastructure is instrumented to
support the Performance Management Architecture products?
a) Network availability instrumentation only
b) Utilization instrumentation
c) Response time and utilization instrumentation
18.
Do you take advantage of management features embedded in network devices
(like Cisco SAA, for example) even though these features may have performance
impact?
a) No, we dont
b) Device performance is so important, we dont turn these features
on
c) We always struggle on how to improve performance metrics with minimal
impact on device performance
19.
Security Policies typically limit Performance Management features provided
by current tools (e.g., SNMP breaches, disabling ICMP echo on some interfaces).
How willing you are to open security in favor of manageability?
a) Not at all
b) Maybe some
c) Well, were always looking for right balance
20.
How critical are internal SLAs to you?
a) We dont discriminate. We treat everyone equally
b) Our users have been asking for it, we are not there yet
c) We allocate our costs to various users and departments based upon SLAs
agreed upon with them
21.
How do you validate that your network service provider is meeting the
SLAs?
a) We trust them
b) The service provider sends us a monthly SLA compliance report
c) We validate service provider compliance report with our own measurements
22.
How do you resolve disputes as your measurements differ from the ones
you receive from ISP, ASP, etc?
a) Very easily
b) Its a long process that shows little return
c) Its a tough process but with payoffs in money back and increased
quality of service