9.6 Ongoing DB Monitoring and Maintenance

Sched or On Dmnd

The "S" indicator states that this work package is slated to be performed on a routine (scheduled) basis. This work package does have "on demand" type of activities in that it supports databases seven days, 24 hours a day, by pager. In this case a determination was made that the off- hour pager support would not be the norm. If we were successful in performing database monitoring on a regular basis, then off-hours support calls should be low. Therefore, we deem this to be a scheduled work package.

Offered

Because ISD maintains production databases that are operational 7 days a a week, 24 hours a day, this work package needs to be offered during that time range.

Skill Set

A Jr. DBA has been slotted to be responsible for this work package. This determination was made because the monitoring is well documented. There are procedures in place for each individual event monitoring routine that is executed against a database. There are also suggested corrective actions documented to help fix problems. An Intermediate or Senior DBA is not needed (but may help out when needed) to perform this scheduled work package. This work package is also a good learning vehicle to help train a junior person.

Freq

In this example, UOM is a database. Frequency is the estimated number of databases that would be supported. In this example, 60 databases were estimated to be supported by the ISD organization.

UOM

Database monitoring and maintenance is proportional to the number of databases being supported. For each database, we need to spend "x" amount of hours on this work package. Because of this, we determined that the unit of measure is a database.

Jr. DBA Effort Hrs/UOM

An estimate of 40 hours a year would be required on each database to monitor and maintain it. This might seem low, but in this estimate many of the 60 databases (frequency) are identical. They are copies of the same database, used for different purposes. Copies of databases are made to support development, testing, training, software patching, and sandbox use. Having the database identical in structure cuts down the number of hours needed to monitor and maintain each database. In theory, if we see problems in one database, identical copies of that database should be having the same problems. This cuts down the need to analyze and resolve problems. Do it once, apply it multiple times.

Total Jr. DBA

This is a calculation of the frequency column (60) times the Jr. DBA Effort Hrs column (40) that equals 2400 hours. This is the estimate of the total hours per year that we projected would be spent on this work package.