What an AMC should actually cover

An annual maintenance contract is usually sold on two numbers: how fast somebody responds, and how much it costs. Both matter. Neither says anything about the work that stops you needing to call.

Reactive cover is the easy half

Response time is easy to write into a contract and easy to measure, which is why it dominates the conversation. It is also the half that only matters once something has already gone wrong.

Worth reading carefully: response time is usually the time to respond, not to fix. Those are different commitments and the difference is where most disappointment lives. If restoration time is what matters to the business, that is the thing to ask about, and the honest answer is usually a range rather than a number.

The preventive half is what you are really buying

The questions worth asking of any contract:

• Are backups verified, and by whom? Not "are they running" — is somebody restoring from them on a schedule and recording the result.
• Are firmware and patch levels reviewed? On a schedule, with a decision recorded each time — including the decision not to update.
• Is capacity tracked? Disk, bandwidth, PoE budget, UPS runtime. Every one degrades quietly and every one has a threshold where it stops being a graph and becomes an outage.
• Are UPS batteries tested? A UPS reports a healthy battery right up until it is asked to hold load. Batteries are consumables with a service life measured in a few years, and testing is the only way to know where in that life you are.
• Are logs reviewed by somebody? Collection is not review. The switch error counters that predict a cable failure are only useful if a person looks at them.

Ask what is excluded

Every contract has exclusions and they are the most informative part of the document. Common ones worth checking: parts, out-of-hours attendance, anything the vendor calls a "project", and equipment past end of support.

That last one deserves attention. Hardware beyond the manufacturer's support date cannot be patched and often cannot be replaced quickly, and a contract that covers it is promising something it can only partly deliver. The useful conversation is about which equipment is approaching that date and what replacing it will cost — before the failure, not after.

A contract should produce a document

The output of good preventive maintenance is an up-to-date picture of the estate: what is installed, what version it runs, when it was last checked, and what is coming to end of life.

If a year of maintenance has not produced that, the contract has been buying attendance rather than maintenance — and the two look identical right up until the day they do not.