What happens during an “IT Assessment”?
Delivering reliable quality with experienced practitioners, every TxMQ engagement starts with some level of assessment, or IT Health Check, from a technical perspective. Project delivery is preceded with a scoping call to identify specific business needs, objectives, and ensure a good fit for TxMQ service delivery. There is a need in some cases for specific technical skills and expertise with certain combinations of technology. The objective, in other cases, is to stand up new technology and assist with adoption into the business model; in other cases, a problem exists in need of a solution. TxMQ assigns its top analysts and engineers, in each assessment to ensure quality recommendations and speedy resolution.
In certain situations during an Assessment, it may be identified that a deeper review, health check, or full architecture review is needed to address the concerns.
Basic TxMQ IT Health Check Service
The basic TxMQ IT Health Check Service involves 2-3 days of onsite and/or remote review of the identified systems. The time frame depends on environment size, as well as other factors.
Typical symptoms that TxMQ is called in to address include; unexpected outages, performance degradation, or general concerns with a specific middleware product such as WebSphere Application Server (WAS), MQ, IIB, WebSphere Message Broker, and Portal. During the Health Check Service, we work to provide immediate corrective action or assist with knowledge transfer and troubleshooting to provide solutions.
When a customer chooses TxMQ for it’s Managed Services provider we will perform an MSP IT Health Check, with an overall assessment of middleware components before transitioning over to TxMQ support, to ensure a proper fit and an appropriately customized service. Our Health Checks involve a review of servers (including midrange and mainframe systems) coming under management support. They also involve interviews with stakeholders such as technology administrators, application owners, database managers and managers to identify problem areas. This is all in preparation for proactive management, the creation of Runbooks, and general assessment for applying updates, fix packs, security changes, and performance tuning. All Health Checks are performed with an initial onsite or remote review followed by remote documentation and a final presentation to provide our findings.
What type of customers benefit from a Full Systems Architecture Assessment?
Customers looking for improved middle-ware availability & stability
Customers looking to bring multiple systems to supported vendor levels
Customers who have SLA concerns or who experience latency on transactions that cross technical platforms
What is a Full Systems Architecture Assessment?
This, 2 to 3 week engagement, provides a broader analysis of all middleware technical components across multiple servers. This deep evaluation assesses your configuration and design for high availability, redundancy, scalability, security performance, load balancing, connectivity, and programming interface.
The result of an architecture review is a detailed document providing an evaluation of each technical component enabling the full end-to-end topology, server and middleware diagrams depicting server connectivity and data flow between systems, and recommendations for improvement. Also, the Architecture Review may include an implementation plan, technical dependencies, and technology roadmap for project initiation, cost evaluation, staffing, and support dependent upon our findings.
Outcomes
TxMQ has performed health checks to do everything from verifying some other consultants’ findings, to completely evaluating a large financial services company branch software to determine why the performance was degrading.
We perform health and compliance checks for companies looking for reassurance that they can handle changing business conditions, including early retirement, or acquisitions. We also perform the assessment post-merger to determine what systems a newly merged entity should keep, and which ones to deprecate.