System administrator troubleshooting responsibilities

The system administrator is responsible for managing an organization's computer and operating systems, for the day-to-day maintenance of the operating system, including back up and recovery, adding and deleting user accounts, and performing software upgrades, and for installing, configuring, and maintaining the network. They work closely with the database administrator and application and business expert to fix problems and increase performance and ensures that all current operating system patches are applied.

The System Expert and Administrator performs the following responsibilities:
Errors
  • Always checks system logs with error timestamp to see if it was caused by a system error
    • For example: InfoSphere® Master Data Management Collaboration Server - Collaborative Edition reporting system error saving a file to docstore should result in the System Expert checking the system logs to see if it is an IO problem or disk full or file system problem.
Monitor
  • Monitors all system errors and critical system messages
  • Checks for disk space getting full
Performance
  • When performance problems arise determines IO bandwidth, memory, swapping, and CPU usage to see if there is a bottleneck in the current hardware setup
  • Checks for the existence of zombie or defunct processes and determines cause of freeze
Client PCs
  • Determines if different software packages on PC might be causing a problem
    • If cannot determine, then remove all non standard packages and see if problem goes away
  • Tracks modifications to all PC settings to determine if a problem was caused by configuration changes
    • For example: Internet Explorer and network settings
Network
  • Configures and maintains load balancer (if applicable) and knows when it may be the cause of a problem
    • For example: if unexpectedly logged out of the system, correlates time of the problem with load balancer logs to see if cause was load balancer
    • Might bypass load balancer completely for a period of time to see if it fixes a problem
  • Configures and maintains proxy server
    • If using a proxy server ensures all relevant proxy server http caches are flushed when a InfoSphere Master Data Management Collaboration Server - Collaborative Edition patch is installed
  • Monitors network bandwidth