I have recently found myself promoted from being on a team of two network/system administrators to managing the team, and I'm looking for a few bits of advice.
Here's a little overview of our team. Right now the team consists of myself and one other person, although the expectation is we will be hiring at least one and possibly two more people onto the team. We support ~75 servers (mostly Windows with a handful of Linux - fairly heterogeneous in configuration/hosted applications), about 3 dozen network switches, wireless, along with associated storage and backup. We also provide networking support for the VoIP infrastructure which is primarily run by our phone office. This team manages everything from the operating system down the stack on all servers (~50% are virtual on ESX) and manages a few core applications (DHCP/DNS/Active Directory/E-Mail/etc). Most of our high-level applications are managed by a separate applications team. There is also a user support team that handles most support requests, although we are an escalation path from that team. In addition to any general comments you may have about managing system administrators I also have a few specific questions: * In a small team managing [what I think to be] a fairly diverse environment like ours how do you handle [cross-]training/redundancy? I know there are a large number of things right now that no one other than me knows how to do. I think I have the everyday issues well documented, but non-routine issues may cause issues. * What are metrics that I should be looking at monitoring/measuring for the team (both as a whole and individually)? There are obvious things to look at in terms of outages and support requests (number handled/time to resolution), but I suspect there are other things that make sense to look at. Additionally any pointers to books/websites/etc. that you think cover this topic would be welcome. -- Thanks Jefferson Cowart [email protected] _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
