Prepare

To prepare for operational excellence, you must understand your workloads and their expected behaviors. You can then design them to provide insight to their status and build the procedures to support them.

Deciding on the tools you use to provide insight and observability into your AWS EUC deployment is key to maintaining acceptable levels of performance and availability. Using well-known, incumbent tools while cloud alternatives are reviewed and deployed should be a part of your design and deployment process.

While training is essential to verify competency across all aspects of AWS EUC service delivery, you should also provide a discrete training environment that won't impact production services.

Create and agree upon specific processes to write and continually update service documentation as your AWS EUC services evolve over time.

Closely control both direct changes to the AWS EUC service itself and indirect changes that affect dependent infrastructure. Formally review any activities that mightaffect the performance, availability, or cost structure usinga cross-disciplinary panel of experts and test all changes before they are deployed into production.

Each workload, desktop, or application service delivered on your AWS EUC system will have a specific architecture, a cadence for updates and patching, metrics for performance monitoring, and availability and resilience requirements. Train and provide appropriate permissions to a dedicated team with deep insight into delivering each workload to verify that each is delivered successfully, promoting user satisfaction and engagement.

While operational training is essential to provide the skills to build and maintain each service, user training is equally important to promote employee engagement and to reduce support calls. Project success or failure can pivot upon successful adoption of the services provided, and successful business outcomes can only be realized if the service users can efficiently use its capabilities.