Sysadmin tips: tools every DevOps needs before leaving for christmas vacation

No administrator wants their Christmas holiday ruined with critical outages and interruptions. The right tools can make your life easier both in the office and during the holidays. If you want to enjoy the holidays and have relaxing weekends without dragging yourself to the office, here are a few tools you should have in your administration arsenal.

Wireshark.

Wireshark is a protocol analyzer that lets you determine bottleneck locations and review suspicious traffic. It's a complex tool for new administrators, but what's great is that it's free. If you have a bottleneck that you can't identify, you can install Wireshark to help you review network traffic and perform root cause analysis. The tool has a wide range of options, so it will take time to master it. However, it can find problems before your users do, which will reduce your stress levels during the holidays.

Any Server Monitoring Tool.

There are so many server monitoring tools on the market that listing them wouldn't be helpful. The tool you use depends on your operating system. Some tool developers offer the same tool for both Linux and Windows-based servers.

Monitoring tools will send you an alert before your server crashes and your network and organization suffers from severe downtime. They monitor heat and temperature, resource usage and software crashes. It's better to get an alert from monitoring services rather than angry users, so any type of monitoring software is a must-have for the holidays.

Remote Login Apps.

There is an abundance of remote login apps out there to choose from. What these tools do is they let you remotely log in to your servers from a smartphone or tablet, instead of having to identify server issues from your home desktop. This can be very convenient when you're at a family dinner or party.

Many network hardware vendors offer you apps for free when you purchase their product, so you can use more high-powered apps specific for your network hardware. These apps let you configure remote servers and routers, review logs, remotely control your server and its resources, and quickly remedy issues before they become critical outages.

Virtual Machines.

You no longer need a physical machine to represent every server. You can use a virtual machine to remote into a network and perform network tasks. Newer versions of the Windows operating system have Hyper-V, which lets you create as many virtual machines as you need. Virtual PC is also a popular tool used to create VMs.

What makes these machines useful during the holidays is that they allow you to spin up a server quickly for developers or a team without allocating too many budget resources. You can spin up a VM during the holidays to satisfy user needs quickly and wait until after the holidays to review network resources to expand on any architecture when you have more time for testing.

With monitoring, remote access, and the right tools, you can leave for the holidays knowing that you won't be interrupted with critical downtime.

If you have any questions regarding any of the above tools or services, don't hesitate to contact ServerPoint support staff. As always, we are here for you!