Maintenance Procedures for High Availability

One of the most effective means of ensuring site availability can also be inexpensive to implement: creating well-documented and accurate maintenance procedures.

Create the following maintenance procedures for your site:

• Change management
• Service-level management
• Problem management
• Capacity management
• Security management

For more information about security management, see Designing Secure Web-Based Applications for Microsoft Windows 2000 by Michael Howard, located online at https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=6711.

Microsoft has created a knowledge base to describe industry experience and best practices for such procedures called the Enterprise Services Frameworks (Microsoft Readiness Framework, Microsoft Solutions Framework, and Microsoft Operations Framework).

When you have a stable set of maintenance procedures, you can begin to explore ways of improving hardware and software availability. System availability depends on more than redundant hardware and software systems.

Implement change control by recording change requests, approvals, and implementations. Change control provides historical configuration checkpoints and helps correlate issues with changes in configuration. For more information about processes for managing configuration, see Chapter 8, "Developing Your Site", in the Microsoft Commerce Server 2000 Resource Kit, available from Microsoft Press.

Escalation procedures help reduce confusion about what to do during outages. Maintain a list of contacts for each level of security, so that you can get the necessary help immediately when an outage occurs.

Service Level Agreement

It is important to require a service level agreement from Internet Service Providers to guarantee an appropriate level of site monitoring, operations, and availability.

Staged Deployment

Deploy your content from development to test environments, and then to a staging environment to identify failures before they reach the production environment. Set up specific release criteria for each environment so that you can determine when the application is ready for release to the next environment.

For example, the development environment is typically the least restrictive, with a high degree of instability. The test environment should be more stable than the development environment and have better performance. The staging environment should be stable. The production environment should be stable and perform at targeted levels.

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