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You'll learn more about what we refer to as "Crawl->Walk→Run" in the Planning section of this guide.
Prioritize
Take the list you just made and prioritize it; top to bottom, everything in order and in its own place. Now, take everything below the top three items and sweep them into a drawer. We'll come back to them in a minute, but for now, set them aside. You don't even want them where you can see them.
Whatever these are, these three answers to "why are you looking for a new NMS?" are your immediate focus.
If you're still in the selection process make sure you discuss these requirements/concerns with your account executive or presales engineer.
Create Goals
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Identify Challenges/Opportunities
Now, take each of the top-3 requirements requirement and create a list of challenges or goals for each. These might be 1:1, but will most likely be 1:many. By specifying the challenges you face, you help define what the solution will look like.
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Example 1
"Tool/vendor consolidation" might result in a list of tools that I you want to retire/replace -
Tool/vendor consolidation:
- Replace current NMS, and proprietary monitoring tools
- Replace collection of point troubleshooting tools (separate ICMP/ping, SNMP collection, graphing, etc)
- Replace current CMDB (spreadsheet purchasing uses)
- Automate NOC runbook (currently a mixture of wiki, text documents, and notes each engineer maintains)
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Example 2
"Create a Single Pane of Glass" might result in a list of tools/views that your team needs dashboard access to -
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- Power Company Outage webpages
- Regional weather/radar maps
- Equipment Performance, including internet circuit graphs
- Current network events, priority, and ownership
- NetFlow/IP-Fix for core circuits alongside performance graphs
Build Use Cases
Note: Use cases can take many formats, and levels fo detail. We are using a light-weight use case format in this example; feel free to elaborate on this if needed.
Great, now you should have a list of priorities and goals for eachchallenges/opportunities/goals. From here you can break down each goal into a list of use cases - specific examples of what administrators, users, or situations/events that support that goal, and how they can/should be handled. Please note that in these examples we are using light-weight use case format. uses cases can take many levels of detail, from simple (as provided here) to very detailed.for how each of these should be handled
Use Case Example 1
For "Replace current NMS, and proprietary monitoring tools" you might create a list of the equipment you have, which technologies/methods are available to monitor those devices, along with any other requirements. These are expressed in examples, or Use Cases
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