network inventory license

The place to start is with network inventory license that will let you gain a better understanding of how your network works and how it delivers services. One good method is the lifecycle approach. This is based on the concept that everything in a network—servers, workstations, services, software and so on—has a lifecycle. By identifying and knowing how each lifecycle works, you can increase your control over it and even anticipate problems before they occur.

There are a lot of sources for life-cycle approaches, but one good example was first illustrated by Microsoft in a white paper entitled “Planning, Deploying and Managing Highly Available Solutions,” released in May 1999, online at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/archive/ (choose IT Tasks | Plan | System Planning | Planning, Deploying and Managing…). This paper identified an IT service lifecycle with four phases.