Summary

In this chapter we have looked at the range of key non-systems components that surround the systems themselves. Documentation, system measurement, data collection and planning, log collection and management, and finally monitoring sensors and alerting based on them. These could almost be considered soft skills within the systems administration realm.

Consistently in environments that I have taken over we have found documentation to be practical non-existent, measuring systems to be all but unheard of, capacity planning being a process no one has ever so much as discussed, monitoring often minimal and unreliable at best, and log collection while well understood, simply a pipe dream when it comes to real world implementation. Yet a single system administrator with almost no resources could, with just some time, pull together some free, open-source software and tackle each of these projects on their own with little to no budgetary constraints and could often hide the workloads...