Management Pack Quality Survey: The Results – Part I: Answers to Questions 2 & 3

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Postings in the same series:
The Survey
Part  I – Answers to Question 1
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As stated before in total 28 people responded to this survey. Some MPs weren’t used by many of them so I skipped those answers since the foundation would be too small to say anything ‘solid’. As a rule of thumb I only looked at the MPs which were used by 13 people or more. This gave me 20 MPs in total:

1. SharePoint 2007
2. SharePoint 2010
3. Exchange 2007
4. Exchange 2010
5. OCS
6. Forefront TMG
7. ISA 2004/2006
8. SCCM
9. Windows Server Operating System
10. File Services 2008 R2
11. Terminal Services
12. Remote Desktop Services
13. Hyper-V
14. SQL
15. IIS
16. AD
17. DNS
18. DHCP
19. WINS
20. Print Server

In this posting I will share the answers given to these two questions:

1. What do you think of the quality of the guides that are delivered with these Management Packs?
2. How long did it take to tune these Management Packs?

Let’s start.

Q01: What do you think of the quality of the guides that are delivered with these Management Packs?

Bad rated MP guides
In total three MP guides got the rating bad (outdated, no updates etc):

1. DHCP
2. WINS
3. Print Server

Poor rated MP Guides
In total eight MP guides got the rating poor (not enough information, still some guessing/searching on the internet required etc):

1. SharePoint 2007
2. SharePoint 2010
3. Exchange 2010
4. OCS
5. Forefront TMG
6. ISA 2004/2006
7. SCCM
8. Terminal Services

Good rated MP Guides
In total nine MP guides got the rating good (all the information required is provided):

1. Exchange 2007
2. Windows Server Operating System
3. File Services 2008 R2
4. Remote Desktop Services
5. Hyper-V
6. SQL
7. IIS
8. AD
9. DNS

Conclusion
It’s not surprising to see that the MPs which are rated bad (see the first posting) also have issues with the related MP guides. Since the overall quality of a MP is judged upon all of its facets among which the related MP guide is a component to be taken seriously. The eight MP Guides rated poor are way too many. Some of these MPs aren’t properly updated thus contain old information are – even worse – contain contradicting information. Other guides are missing information. The guides which are rated good are nine in total. Which is good but not good enough since eleven other guides aren’t up to specs. So there is still some work to do for the people responsible for the related MP guides.

The raw results for this question can be found here.

Q02: How long did it take to tune these Management Packs?

Hard to tune and is an ongoing process
In total two MPs got this rating:

1. Exchange 2010;
2. SCCM (when this survey was launched the new SCCM MP was just life. So the new version of the MP should get a better rating since the most problematic issues with this MP have been addressed in the latest version of this MP).

Some weeks to tune
Four MPs got this rating:

1. OCS
2. File Services 2008 R2
3. AD
4. DNS

On itself it’s a logical thing since these four MPs cover the more complicated infrastructural/communication services. Therefore it takes some weeks to tweak and tune the related MPs as well.

One week or less to tune
Five MPs got this rating:

1. SharePoint 2010
2. Exchange 2007
3. ForeFront TMG (equal amount of answers ranging from some weeks to one day...)
4. Windows Server Operating System
5. SQL

Some days or just one day to tune
Nine MPs got this rating:

1. SharePoint 2007
2. ISA 2004/2006
3. Terminal Services
4. Remote Desktop Services
5. Hyper-V
6. IIS
7. DHCP
8. WINS
9. Print Server

Conclusion
The Hyper-V MP is very basic so there is not much to tune. The Print Server MP is old and hasn’t got an update for a long time, so this MP doesn’t work with Windows Server 2008 (R2) based Print Servers. Therefore there isn’t much to tune either. The DHCP MP isn’t that nice either and very basic so there is much to tune. Basically the real good MPs (like SQL, AD, DNS, Windows Server) take more then a day to tune. So the amount of time required to tune a MP doesn’t necessarily tell the quality of a MP. The only exception here are the MPs which require ongoing tuning. This means something is really amiss with those MPs. Again, the SCCM MP is renewed. Much of the noise is cut down so this version of the SCCM MP should require less effort to tune.

Other MPs require tuning for some time since they monitor complex infrastructures like SharePoint, AD and DNS. Which is acceptable as long as in some point of time the tuning stops and only some maintenance in order to reflect infrastructural changes are required.

The raw results for this question can be found here.

In the next posting of this series I will post and discuss the answers given to the fourth and fifth question in this survey. So stay tuned!