Operations System Administration Network » stats

SA Tenets – Manage the Interesting

Jim Sheafer — Mon, 04 May 2009 02:00:30 +0000

This is a continuation of the “SA Tenets” series of posts in which I discuss my beliefs about System Administration and work in general

Manage the Interesting

So, you are collecting your statistics. Any you look at them every so often. Maybe you even meet to review them with your customers and bosses.

Don’t waste everyone’s time by reviewing graphs of stats that never change.

Spend your time managing the stats that are interesting. If someone asks “Why did that happen?” Or makes a comment like “That’s strange…” that is what you should be spending time managing.

This one seems very basic, but I have seen too many instances of people trying to demonstrate that all is well. Don’t do that more than once. Show what you are collecting, then only show it again if something is wrong. Going on for even a few minutes about how everything is wonderful is just a waste of time.

The full list of my tenets can be found at the top of the site.

SA Tenets – If You Can’t Measure It, You Can’t Manage It

Jim Sheafer — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 02:00:20 +0000

This is a continuation of the “SA Tenets” series of posts in which I discuss my beliefs about System Administration and work in general

If You Can’t Measure It, You Can’t Manage It

“No news is good news” just isn’t valid in the Operations SA world. You need to be watching stats on every little process, at all times.

Which is impossible, of course.

So you need to have automated collection of stats on all your processes, and automated alarming when those stats step outside of the normal bounds. And each time you find and fix an issue, you have the potential to need to add yet another statistic with yet another alarm.

All too often a problem is found to be caused by a process that is not monitored enough, or at all. You probably don’t have too many stats, but too few – no matter how many you are currently collecting.

The full list of my tenets can be found at the top of the site.