If you have a safe and funcional server network in your company, and all the services are working well, you may have a very good SysAdmin (maybe an entire IT team) working to keep everything online.
System administrators, IT people, IT workers… no matter what you call them, all these professionals have one thing in common: they are great at fixing technology related problems.
A SysAdmin is the responsible for maintenance, setup and implementation of systems as servers, specially multiuser systems. One of their main activities is to ensure uptime, performance and servers’ security answer all the users’ expectations.
To answer this demand, a SysAdmin must install, setup, update, automatize, and keep security policies. Not to mention the occasional problems that require some technical support.
5 tools to speed up your work as SysAdmin
Just like any other profession, some tools can help to ensure the speed and flow of daily tasks. We listed 5 tools that every SysAdmin should know below:
This is the ideal tool for professionals who need to manage many servers while maintaining the same configuration in each one. Puppet makes SysAdmin’s work much easier, since it allows you to keep the same configuration on each server without the need to access and adjust every single one.
With this tool it is possible to centralize the configuration files, keeping all servers organized and with the same configuration.
Zabbix is a monitoring tool for networks, servers and services. Just like Puppet, it is an essential tool to keep the infrastructure functional.
This is a Perl script that quickly verifies the server’s MySQL and gives suggestions to improve stability and performance.
SysAdmin need constantly to analyse network packages and verify ocasional problems over the system. One of the most known tools to run this analysis is tcpdump.
- Terminator
Lastly, but also very important, the Terminator. It is a GNU/Linux terminal that differs from most terminals, which have tabs. Terminator allows you to split the window in several parts, either horizontally or vertically, making the job easier without having to open multiple tabs. In addition to that, the terminal has several plugins that are super useful for day-to-day.
What about you? Did you know about these tools? Is there any other useful tool for SysAdmins, specially for cloud computing, that is not on the list? Tell us in the comments!
