Chapter 7. Beyond the Boundaries

This chapter includes the following topics:

• Business requirements overview

• Assessing demarcation points

• Recognizing your limits

• Meeting service needs

• Assigning the correct QoS system

You may only operate (own) part of your delivery mechanism, relying on third-party organizations to deliver your application to both your internal staff and your customers. This chapter discusses approaches to this situation, covering ways to work within these confinements.

It begins by discussing how and where to establish your demarcation points. This not only helps to define your management structure, it also expedites fault-condition resolution by having clearly defined areas of responsibility.

It then discusses using this demarcation point information to recognize when you have reached the limits of your responsibility in the continuing optimization and application performance-monitoring (APM) model.

Next, it discusses how to incorporate business criteria into the APM process and introduces the concept of business service management.

Considering the newly assigned demarcation points, the chapter revisits the concept of assigning the quality of service (QoS) mechanism learned in Chapter 5, "QoS and MPLS: Tools to Manage Application Performance," and Chapter 6, "Application Deployment."

Finally, it discusses the importance of reporting, ensuring that the information is aimed at the correct target audience, and that it is clearly presented for all parties across the delivery system.