IT Management - A Scalable Approach

    For a long time he was a passive reader of Habr, but he gathered his courage and decided to share his experience. I hope my ideas will benefit in the daily practice of admins.

    A couple of months ago, I carried out an analysis of IT infrastructure at work, during which it was necessary to identify the weaknesses and give recommendations for improvement. I am sure the situation that I encountered is known to many. For several years, the company has changed significantly and has grown significantly, however, some elements in the IT infrastructure used have remained unchanged over the past 10 plus years. As a result, various patches and tricks were regularly invented in order to put everything together, which, obviously, did not add stability and efficiency to the overall system. The result was a review of the overall infrastructure and business process requirements in order to choose a new single solution. In other words, revolution, not evolution.



    In many, if not all, small offices, system administration begins in a rather wild way, without any plan for the future. This, in general, is not surprising, because the management is more concerned about financial well-being, and a newly appeared admin rarely thinks about his place of work after 5-10 years. However, if you are still “lucky" to work in the same company for so much time, you may well be in a situation where, it would seem, everything works as intended, but the number of isolated and incompatible systems indecently exceeds the labor resources of the IT department. This is exactly what happened in the organization where I analyzed IT infrastructure, which once started with one server and two IT workers, and now has hundreds of user machines, its own data center and a high-performance mainframe.

    The following recommendations are a brief excerpt from a general analysis document and represent tips for building IT systems in the light of future development and potential deployment of new products.

    Data management



    • Decide in advance how you will store all credentials (user names, machine configurations, warranty records, finances, and so on). Avoid notes, notes on a piece of paper, copies of receipts and the like - all this will sooner or later be lost, no matter how you try.
    • Choose a single platform to manage this data. At the same time, it is better not to rely on a specific product (Microsoft Active Directory, Novell eDirectory, (Open) LDAP, etc.), if this is not a specialized package for IT management. Ultimately, the requirements may go beyond the functionality of the product, therefore it is very important to have a public and widely used interface for access (e.g. LDAP).
    • Try to always integrate new systems into your chosen platform. The presence of three or more isolated systems (for example, a corporate website + mail, a Windows domain and accounting for Internet traffic) is a clear sign that it is time to think about the future of such an architecture.
    • Try to save everything there , including data on the work performed, machine configuration, warranty service and software licenses. This will give you the opportunity to learn about the history of a particular station and its user and help to prove that you are not an elephant. Your actions are legal in case of checks. In addition, you will have something to show the bosses the question of what you were doing.


    Client approach to users


    • Treat your users as customers. Of course, everyone has heard about accountants and cleaners, inexperienced users, but in the end it will help you to differentiate your area of ​​responsibility from the area of ​​tricks with black magic and dancing around all electrical appliances.
    • Keep records of all user hits. You can perfectly remember employees in person, but when the IT department grows for the next employee, and the company grows significantly, it will be impossible to remember and explain to each other who and what demanded of you.
    • Give users the ability to track the history and status of their calls , as well as send requests remotely. This will give you time to work instead of walking around from office to office or listening to problems on the phone.


    IT tasks


    • Automate everything that can be automated . Of course, it is always important to evaluate “whether the game is worth the candle”, but when creating any code you win twice - speed up the solution to an existing problem and create a tool for yourself that can be useful in the future.
    • Create a bulletin board (in material or electronic form) . The most annoying situation is when the main means of communication between employees (for example, chat or e-mail) falls, and while you are busy restoring the service, they constantly call you asking “what happened?”
    • If you are not the only IT employee, select a special person (one or more) to receive requests from users. It is always better when you can concentrate on your work and you are not distracted by the phone or “visitors”.


    Knowledge Base


    • Build and maintain a Knowledge Base . Write down all non-trivial decisions that belong to the category of “made and forgotten”. Try also to integrate it with the configuration of all stations. In this case, it will be easier for you and your colleagues to solve problems that someone has already solved in the past. In addition, if an apocalypse happens and you have to reinstall one of the key servers, such a knowledge base will significantly speed up the process.
    • Create a list of the most common problems and solutions to them . These can be known bugs in systems or frequent user requests.
    • Add the ability to automatically save system logs from the most critical services and leave these entries for a long time. Thus, you can track what has been happening with the system lately, which will help you understand the reason for the error.
    • Give users partial access to the database, and the ability to add your comments and posts . Believe me, some of them can understand their area no worse than you. In addition, it will give other users the opportunity to try to solve the problem themselves before calling you for help.


    The most important


    Always keep a backup copy of all your data , especially if you are implementing any of the above. Such a copy should not be on a parallel server and not on your personal machine, but preferably somewhere on the other side of the city, or, better, on another continent. At any moment, a situation can occur (blackout, fire, mask shows), when you are left with either completely killed equipment, or even without it. In this case, it will be very disappointing to lose that very base with him, which would help restore everything.

    Of course, in all these recommendations it is important to choose a balance between the time available and the need for implementation. A lot of this is available in ready-made products for IT management, which the directors of IT departments of large enterprises are not aware of. Unfortunately, most of them are proprietary (Remedy, LANDesk) and cost a lot of money, that is, if you work in a small company, the probability of introducing a similar product tends to zero. However, there are free open source solutions, often quite simple ( SimpleTicket , Liberium , osTicket ), but there are also more functional ones, for example OTRS. Most of them, unfortunately, do not offer a Russian translation. Your humble servant is currently developing a SAAS version of the IT management, but this is a completely different story;)

    I did not write the article, posted it at the request of the author. If you want to send an invite, letoosh@letoosh.com

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