H3C Technologies H3C Intelligent Management Center - Manual (Page 44)

30
Each group of stakeholders has a unique perspective and store of knowledge and experience of the
network infrastructure that help guide a successful IMC deployment. The most obvious example is the
network engineering team who can provide network diagrams, and device model and series information
for network devices. They also should participate in the decisions regarding which traps or Syslog events
from network devices should be escalated to alarms and which traps should be filtered. They should also
provide input into alarm thresholds and frequency of alerting. For organizations that do in-house
application development, QA teams can be a resource for information on application environments as
well as what services, systems, and devices should be monitored and what the device and application
dependencies are. Also, they can help guide alarm threshold definitions.
Identifying stakeholder needs
The requirements for most stakeholders can be reduced to two basic needs: visibility and access.
Visibility is the ability to see into the network infrastructure; to see into the devices, resources, links, and
systems that constitute it; and the ability to see how well the network is performing and meeting the
organization's needs. Delivering visibility to stakeholders is accomplished by collecting data from
network resources, analyzing it, and presenting it in various formats. In addition, some if not all
stakeholders need access to IMC to configure or manage devices and to obtain data.
Common data requirements
Use the following questions as a starting point for developing your own process and set of questions for
gathering requirements from those people in your organization who use or benefit by IMC.
1. What Data is needed?
• What are the devices, resources, or systems that constitute the services that the stakeholders are
responsible for?
The list of devices, resources, systems that a stakeholder offers provide you with two key pieces
of information:
{
The list of resources to monitor.
{
The vendor, series, and model information you need to research to determine what metrics or
data is available and what data you can collect from every device.
• What are the key metrics or performance indicators that the stakeholders use to measure the
effectiveness of the services they are responsible for delivering?
The list of key metrics or performance indicators that a stakeholder offers, provide several key
pieces of information:
{
How the stakeholder measures success.
{
What the stakeholder needs in terms of data to measure success.
{
If the information that the stakeholder needs can or cannot be met by the data collected by IMC
from the devices, services, or systems that constitute the service the stakeholder delivers.
• What are the quantifiable targets or goals that the stakeholders have set for delivering on their
service commitments?
The list of goals that a stakeholder defines enables you to align with the stakeholder's needs
and use IMC to meet the organization's needs and goals. In addition, this information helps
define threshold settings for alarms and monitoring requirements.
• What baseline data do the stakeholders have for measuring their targets and goals against?