Triage concepts

Planning is important and prepares you for many eventualities. When disaster finally strikes, though, most planning is going to go straight out the window. All of your assurances that your backups are good are not going to make you relax, end users are going to be panicking, management is going to forget that you have to fix things and pull you into meetings, stress is high, and nothing is quite as expected from the planning process.

Triage is hard because every workload, time of day, current situation has so many dynamic elements. We have to be ready to adjust to anything, and we have to get our systems back online as quickly as possible.

At the moment of a disaster is when things matter most and this is where system administrators really prove their mettle. Being prepared for a disaster is relatively easy, but staying cool and logical, evaluating the situation in real time, and managing the people around you all become unpredictable and very emotional challenges...