Business Critical Service Asset Questions

For every asset that supports business critical service, Visible Ops recommends the following questions be answered:

What does it do?
What is the hardware platform?
What is the operating system platform?
What applications are installed?
Who is responsible for this asset’s uptime?
What service(s) does it support?
Who is authorized to make changes?
What does this box do for the business?
What will happen when this box stops working completely?
What will happen when the performance of this box is severely degraded?
What is the change success rate?
Is this device fragile? Can we build a new one if it fails?
What are its dependencies?
What other infrastructure depend on this unit?
What planned and unplanned changes have been made?
What is the device’s name? Is it appropriate for the tasks performed?
What is the outage cost? (In other words, the cost per minute of downtime)
Where is it physically located?
Is there anything odd about this box?
Is this a generally-supported platform in our company?
Is this box going to go away in the next few months?
How do we get access to this box (remote or otherwise)?
How is this unit backed up?
How long does it take to re-provision this unit (estimate)?
How long can the business afford to be without it?
Are we monitoring this unit for changes?
Are we fault-monitoring this device?
Do the fault-monitoring assumptions match the dependency realities?
If the unit is mission critical, then are there adequate hardware backups in place (power supply, network card, RAM, etc)?
Why do we feel that this unit is unstable (if applicable)?
Is there anything that needs attention on this unit?