Questions to ask about business critical service IT assets

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?

Source: Starting a Visible Ops-Based Change Management Program / Tori Harris, Ron Zika / Tripwire, Inc.

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