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Tuesday, 3 July 2007
Being IT
Part Two – The Daily Checklist – To read the other articles in this series check the links at the end of the article.
The Daily Checklist
A number of essential documents kick the day off as the focus for a number of administrative activities. Of these the most important is the daily checklist. My particular checklist constantly evolves and over the years has changed in form quite a lot, primarily to reflect changes in infrastructure or software applications, but in its current form it works quite well.
A link to the latest daily system administration checklist is included at the end of this article (all available resources are also in the downloads section).
The purpose of this daily checklist, as its name implies, is to ensure all those regular MUST DO jobs that actually DO get done. Let’s face it – we all have jobs we like doing and jobs that need doing and typically our preference is to get side-tracked into the nice jobs. Not only this but quite often the moment you arrive at work you will probably be greeted by a number of issues which require urgent attention – once these are done the checklist might be overlooked.This is where trouble can start. How many times have we forgotten to update a log, check some disk space, or put a backup tape in place because we were sidetracked with other tasks?
Some of these must jobs include (but are not limited to):
- Checking renewals that are due
- Progressing outstanding quotes and orders
- Scanning documentation and filing/archiving
- Checking Disk Space on Servers
- Checking Event Logs
- Checking EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) Status
- Verifying Email filters are working
- Verifying Anti-Virus/Anti-Spam systems are up to date and operational
I have learned, mostly the hard way, to always get out of the way all of the seemingly mundane jobs early on thus leaving whatever time is left to focus on other more enjoyable aspects of the job. A completed daily checklist can offer a high degree of confidence that the system is not going to fail due to something minor such as a disk space issue.
Believe me, these jobs are life savers so work them into your ethos – a familiar metaphor to drive the point home is ‘look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves’. By taking care of the smaller jobs then problems can often be avoided or detected early on. Allowing days to go by without checking a particular server, especially in a terminal services environment like ours, is just asking for trouble. And don’t forget those essential state backups – so easy to be missed for days on end but they take only a few minutes and could be the difference between recovering a machine quickly and having to rebuild a machine from the ground up.
Resources:
Daily Checklist (PDF)
For other posts in the ‘Being IT’ Series:
Being IT – Part Four – User Support
Being IT – Part Three – Administration
Beint IT – Part Two – The Daily Checklist
Being IT – Part One – The Basics
Related
- Are there any useful tools to speed up administrative tasks?
- Regular Administrative Tasks
- Installing Exchange 2000 on Windows Server 2000
- The basics of formal Information Technology Management
- Dealing with many entries in log files
I hated doing morning checks when I worked for a large department store. So much so I would write as many scripts as possible to automate the processes. Do you use something like Nagios? That saved the department loads of time. Although some lazy individuals in the department could even do that! So we still had to sign our name against the checks.
Jamie
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head there Jamie, unfortunately morning checks are not the most exciting of ways to start the day. These days I’ve got a number of scripts that do many of the checks and email the results to me using BLAT such that it becomes a task of checking my email and ticking the list but, call me old fashioned, I always feel more reassured when I see things ticked off on a sheet – it’s ever so easy to miss something when you have so many checks to perform.
PC Pro have covered Nagios a few times and it does look like a very useful product but I haven’t used it myself – primarily because it’s a Linux product. Mind you, with Virtual Server it makes the whole multi-os thing much less of an issue than it used to be so I may give it a try.
I’ve been trying to use Microsofts SCE but like many of these tools it needs a great deal of committment to get it to do useful things.
The biggest bugbear of mine is event logs, which I’ve written about many a time – the latest is here.
Jas.
Nagios was a learning curve but with it’s ability to interact with Linux and Windows it was well worth it. We ran it on a low spec machine attached to a large wide screen in the IT department office. I believe Nagios has some additional pluggin for event logs on Windows machines.
I’m unable to find a link to your daily checklist in PDF format. Are you able to supply me a copy please?