Concept Map and Documentation for Support of a Service: First Draft

As a reminder, interactive assignments are student led, with replies from the students rather than the instructor.  For this interactive assignment, you will continue to work as lead system administrator for the fictions organization you used for the assignment in Week 1. You have tried unsuccessfully to locate the documentation for the existing services at the organization. While the existing team has done a really good job of performing the daily IT tasks, there have been occasional disruptions and outages. You believe the disruptions could have been kept to a minimum or even eliminated had there been documentation for the services. Since it is your job to ensure that all the services are reliable, you have decided to create documentation for one of the services.

For this interactive assignment, you are going to create a concept map and documentation for a service. You will begin by selecting a service that could be running at the organization. This weeks reading provides examples of services that are in a typical IT infrastructure (e.g., email, print, data storage, backup and restore). Other services not specifically discussed that are running at your organization would include domain name system (DNS) and dynamic host configuration protocol (DHCP), and there are many additional examples of services in the Limoncelli, Hogan, and Chalup (2017) textbook.

 
Concept Map
Create a concept map for your selected service that includes at least four specific components of a reliable service as discussed in your text.

For example, for email services, Limoncelli, Hogan, and Chalup (2017) point out that email systems require well-managed namespaces (Chapter 39), reliable nameservices (Chapter 40), service monitoring (Chapter 38), and backups (Chapter 44). Refer to the Email Service Concept Map as an example. In this example, note that the concept map acts as an outline for the documentation that needs to be created, with each circle on the map representing the documentation that needs to be created to support the service.

The following three components must be included in your concept map:

Policies
Building
Monitoring

Suggestions for additional components include the following:

Reliability
Centralization
Performance
Namespaces
Documentation
Simplicity
Scaling
Automation
Redundancy
Troubleshooting
Access

Do not include the following components:

Standards such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology Special Publication (NIST SP) 800 series, Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS), Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), or any other relevant standard in use in the industry.

Note: Limoncelli, Hogan, and Chalup (2017) include standards as a component of a reliable service. However, this topic will be covered in Week 3, so for this interactive assignment standards should not be included.
 
Documentation
In a separate document from the concept map, create documentation that provides details about each of the components you identified in your concept map.
For example, what protocols or open source software would be used in the building component? The details needed for each component should be at a high level. The details need to be specific enough that you could rebuild the service, if required. However, you do not want to provide step-by-step instructions on building the service. Any good system administrator would be able to locate these details from the vendor. You must include a minimum of one paragraph per component (four paragraphs minimum).
In your submittal,

Attach your concept map and documentation.
Briefly indicate the service and the components you have selected for the interactive assignment.