Know Your Resources

System administration is mostly a matter of balancing available resources against the people and programs that use those resources. Therefore, your career as a system administrator will be a short and stress-filled one unless you fully understand the resources you have at your disposal.

Some of the resources are ones that seem pretty obvious:

• System resources, such as available processing power, memory, and disk space

• Network bandwidth

• Available money from the IT budget

But some may not be so obvious:

• The services of operations personnel, other admins, or even an administrative assistant

• Time (often of critical importance when the time involves things such as the amount of time during which system backups may take place)

• Knowledge — whether it is stored in books, system documentation, or the brain of a person that has worked at the company for the past twenty years

The important thing to note is that it is highly valuable to take a complete inventory of those resources that are available to you, and to keep it current — a lack of "situational awareness" when it comes to available resources can often be worse than no awareness.