Moving to a Production Environment
134 Portal Server 6 2005Q1 • Deployment Planning Guide
• Determine whether your current physical infrastructure is capable of
supporting the transaction volume requirement you have defined. Identify
services that are the first to max out as you increase the activity to the portal.
This indicates the amount of headroom you have as well as identify where to
expend your energies.
• Measure and monitor your traffic regularly to verify your model.
• Use the model for long-range scenario planning. Understand how dramatically
you need to change your deployment to meet your overall growth projections
for upcoming years.
• In a production system, keep the error logging level to
ERROR and not MESSAGE.
The
MESSAGE error level is verbose and can cause the file system to quickly run
out of disk space. The
ERROR level logs all error conditions and exceptions.
Documenting the Portal
A comprehensive set of documentation on how your portal functions is an
important mechanism to increasing the supportability of the system. The different
areas that need to be documented to create a supportable solution include:
• System architecture
• Software installation and configuration
• Operational procedures, also known as a “run book”
• Software customizations
•Custom code
• Third-party products integration
The run book outlines troubleshooting techniques as well as the deployment life
cycle. Make this book available during the training and transfer of knowledge
phase of the project.
TIP Do not wait until the end of the deployment project, when time and
money are usually running short, to begin this documentation
phase. Documenting your portal should occur as an ongoing activity
throughout the entire deployment.