Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

A year ago, in July of 2020, I started my SysAdmin Day post  with the words, Here we are, 12 months later, and a lot has changed, but life (and tech) continue to be extraordinarily not-normal. The challenges we face as IT pros in general and SysAdmins in particular push us to our limits daily, and there’s no hiding or sugar-coating it. In the face of all this, I’d like to offer some new thoughts for my SysAdmin family to help process the year that was and navigate the challenges to come.

Engineering teams can only be as efficient as the processes they employ during development. The need for increased efficiency is why software development has shifted from the “waterfall” approach to a more responsive, agile methodology. In an agile development environment, quality software can be delivered consistently to suit the ever-changing needs of stakeholders and end users.

Unattended incidents won’t clean up after themselves and will come back to haunt you—whether as rising MTTR metrics, a cluttered Incident Index, fruitless back-and-forth communication, or a declining CSAT score. Powerful automation conditions can drive productivity, save you manual work, and speed up your incident lifecycle management —and keep your employees happy.

In our previous blog, we looked back at the year of transformation that was 2020. To say the last year was a bit hectic—even chaotic at times—would be an understatement. But for many organizations, IT saved the day. IT delivered and enabled technology solutions to keep the business in business.

A data center typically employs between 30-200 people depending on the size and the intended project use. But only a fraction of those folks run the IT side. Besides swapping gear—the infamous “remote hands”—there isn’t much to do as long as there aren’t any outages, and rumor has it a data center is a nice place to sleep—it’s dark, cool, and the deep humming noise can have a pacifying impact on some.

Storage performance is key to the health and performance of a SQL Server database. When storage performance begins to slow down, queries suffer from more waits on disk. These waits can show up as a variety of SQL Server wait types, including WRITELOG and wait types starting with PAGEIOLATCH.

No longer a foreign concept, remote access has gained traction with businesses to facilitate convenient off-site support and virtual meetings, especially during these recent pandemic times. TeamViewer has been a popular professional choice for remote administration with its all-in-one solution that can be installed and updated with ease.

Planning a hybrid application migration? There’s plenty to deal with already, and now your manager wants to know—how are you going to make sure that the migration is a success? The secret is to take a subjective judgment and turn it into an objective one. As you probably know, there is no way that you can guarantee a problem-free migration. Don’t leave it up solely to how your boss or anyone else feels about the migration.