Total Cost of Ownership of BPPM - Part 11: Best practice - Document implementation with check points

You were excited to start implementing a new version of BPPM.  You spent days or weeks reading through BMC documents, communicating with your system administrators to get the servers ready, communicating with your DBAs to get your database ready, navigating through complicated installation processes with various options regarding to high availability and integration, and you may have had to open cases with BMC Support to finally finish installing different BPPM components on different systems.

Then when you started all BPPM components and log into BPPM GUI, you realized it didn't work - BPPM components didn't communicate with each other, data or events didn't show up in BPPM GUI, and several errors were seen in log files.  Which part went wrong?  You ended up opening another case with BMC Support.

Sounds familiar?  What is worse is that, after you spend another week or so working with BMC Support to finally figure out what went wrong and make the correction, the similar headache may happen again when you start BPPM implementation in another environment.

This situation can be improved or even avoided by adding check points in your implementation process.  Check points are verification steps to perform after completing installation or configuration of partial or one BPPM component.  Check points give you confirmation of "so far so good" before moving into the next step in implementation.

For example, before you install BPPM server, a check point should be running some SQL statements to verify correct Oracle user accounts and tablespaces are created. When finishing installing a H/A pair of BPPM Integration Services and one PATROL agent, another check point should be verifying that PATROL agent can fail over to the secondary BPPM Integration Service when the primary one goes down.

Check points help you notice the problems in your installation or configuration so you can correct them as they occur.  If a check point fails, it is a whole lot easier to find out what went wrong and correct it right there than realizing things don't work at the end of implementation.

In addition, it is highly recommended that you write your own version of installation and configuration documents with all check points.  The installation and configuration documents from BMC are generic version.  It will take you much longer to read them and apply them to your own environment.

When implementing a new version of BPPM for the first time, write down all the steps you performed and information you entered to create your own version of installation and configuration documents.  I personally like to save all screen shots in the documents because one picture is worth a thousand words.  And of course, always include detailed steps for check points.

This may seem to be time consuming first especially when you are under the pressure to have the installation "done" before the deadline.  But having your own version of installation and configuration documents will drastically speed up future deployment and trouble-shooting process.  My experience from working on BMC products for the last 20 years has proven to me that it is totally worth the effort.