Acme Corporation’s (ACME) core business is to provide electronic payment services to financial
institutions and companies worldwide. They serve clients worldwide with local offices in the
Americas. EMEA, and Asia Pacific. There are data centers located in North America, South
America. China, and Italy.
One of ACME’S core services is credit card transaction processing (CCTP). At the core of CCTP
are multiple clusters of application servers running IBM WebSphere. Transactions are stored in a
database environment running on the mainframe. There are additional distributed databases to the
application running on Oracle and MS SQL. The clusters of application servers are distributed
throughout the data centers. The customers’ clients connect to the environment Web-based
services such as SOAP, and message queues such as IBM WebSphere MQ. In addition the client
hosts dedicated CCTP environments for some of its customers.
Each of the four data centers has a local operations team which is responsible for maintaining the

local servers, network devices, connections, and commercial off the shelf (COTS) applications that
CCTP runs on. The primary North America data center has the worldwide operations center which
is responsible for worldwide CCTP monitoring (including its own data center) and coordinating with
the local operations teams. It also houses the worldwide helpdesk which provides Level 1 CCTP
issue resolution and coordinates response of all CCTP issues (Level 1-3). CCTP application
developers (Level 3) are located in North America and Ireland.
ACME currently uses Omegamon to monitor the mainframe. HP OpenView. IBM Tivoli NetView
and Nagios to monitor parts of the network, and SMS and BMC Patrol to monitor the distributed
environment. The data center in Italy is currently using IBM Tivoli Monitoring, but it has not been
rolled out to CCTP. In addition, most of the local operations centers use variety of custom scripts
and open source programs to monitor the COTS and CCTP applications. Each of the local data
centers has some sort of the central view of their monitoring, but not all of the monitoring is
sending events to the central or worldwide views. The help desk uses HP Service Manager as its
ticketing system.
ACME is experiencing several major issues with CCTP.
The first is that the helpdesk is spending too much time in reaction mode (responding to issues
after the fact).
The second is that credit card transaction processing slows down at random intervals. These
slowdowns are usually noticed by the client’s customers first (as they violate their Service Level
Agreements) and that the intervals between issues range from hours to weeks.
The third is that there is no central view of the CCTP server and the environment that it runs on.
What is a potential question to ask ACME personnel?

Which two factors have the greatest impact on the scope and scale of a Service Availability and
Performance Management solution? (Choose two.)

Which statement is true about a relationship and a dependency between major project plan
milestones?