Hi Jim,

I have a few clients for whom I have done something similar to what you are asking.

You have probably found my CV around, but if not, go here -

http://www.skills-1st.co.uk/ .  I have been around the systems

management part of the industry for over 20 years, many of them around

IBM and the last 5 years or so, I have focused much more on open source

solutions, especially Zenoss.

I do a mixture of teaching and consultancy and have developed a couple

of Zenoss workshops that have run several times, both in classroom

environments and using remote-teach technologies.  If you found me here on

the Zenoss forum then you probably know that I have been contributing

responses, documents and ZenPacks over several years.

I have a number of clients for whom I have done similar Zenoss work to

what you propose.  These days, I actually have more remote clients that I

have never met face-to-face, than those that I actually visit!  We find

that a combination of Skype and remote access to a client's Zenoss

system, works well.  For access, we have a fixed external IP address; so

some folk simply open ports 8080 and ssh for our source address to their

zenoss server.  We have also used nx, VNC, Citrix and various VPN

technologies.

Typically an engagement starts with a healthcheck to understand your

environment and provides written recommendations.  Typically this is 2

days - depends on the size of the environment and how many issues there

are with it.  Simple issues I will generally fix in the 2 days.

Once we agree what needs changing, we can work in 3 ways:

1) I fix it

2) You fix it

3) We fix it - generally I've used VNC as a screen-sharing technology

though I have also used join.me

Depends entirely on you.  My feeling is that folk ought to insist on

skills transfer whenever they use a consultant, but often workloads

don't permit.  Looks like you are US East Coast so the time difference

shouldn't be a big issue.

Some folk then setup an ad hoc support contract - typically between 1

and 5 days - to fix problems as they arise.  We cannot offer a formal

9-to-5 support contract as I have other clients and commitments but,

other than planned holidays, I am generally contactable

one-way-or-another, most days and will respond to issues as quickly as

possible.  For such contracts, I generally provide a weekly timesheet

for work done so we all know where we stand.  Billing is monthly or at

the end of a contract, payable 28 days after invoice date.  Rates for

remote work are £800 (GB pounds) / day.; "days" are typically made up of

hours spread over a much longer period.  We will only bill for work

actually done; if you setup a 5-day contract and you feel we have

finished in 3 days, you get billed for 3 days.

With regard to your points 1-4, I think the 2-day healthcheck will

probably tackle points 1-3.  Updating Zenoss depends rather on where you

are starting from and where you want to get to?  Also, the number of

ZenPacks installed can have a big bearing on this.  If you are at a

Zenoss 2.x then it is probably worth upgrading to 3.1 or 3.2.1 - depends

very much on exactly what ZenPacks you have installed.  If you are at

3.1, I personally would stay there.  3.2 wasn't good and although 3.2.1

fixed many issues, it broke some more ZenPacks.  4 is currently in alpha

but I wouldn't be anticipating putting that anywhere near production

this side of summer.

Does that help?

Please feel free to discuss further.

Kind regards,

Jane