Essential SNMP, 2nd Edition

Change Management

Change management deals with, well, managing change. In other words, you need to plan for both scheduled and emergency changes to your network. Not doing so can cause networks and systems to be unreliable at best and can upset the very people you work for at worst. The following sections provide a high-level overview of change management techniques. The following techniques are recommended by Cisco. See the end of this section for the URL to this paper and others on the topic of network management.

Planning for Change

Change planning is a process that identifies the risk level of a change and builds change planning requirements to ensure that the change is successful. The key steps for change planning are as follows:

• Assign all potential changes a risk level prior to scheduling the change.

• Document at least three risk levels with corresponding change planning requirements. Identify risk levels for software and hardware upgrades, topology changes, routing changes, configuration changes, and new deployments. Assign higher risk levels to nonstandard add, move, or change types of activity.

• The high-risk change process you document needs to include lab validation, vendor review, peer review, and detailed configuration and design documentation.

• Create solution templates for deployments affecting multiple sites. Include information about physical layout, logical design, configuration, software versions, acceptable hardware chassis and modules, and deployment guidelines.

• Document ...