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Field studies of computer system administrators: analysis of system management tools and practices
- In CSCW ’04: Proceedings of the 2004 ACM conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work
, 2004
"... Computer system administrators are the unsung heroes of the information age, working behind the scenes to configure, maintain, and troubleshoot the computer infrastructure that underlies much of modern life. However, little can be found in the literature about the practices and problems of these hig ..."
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Computer system administrators are the unsung heroes of the information age, working behind the scenes to configure, maintain, and troubleshoot the computer infrastructure that underlies much of modern life. However, little can be found in the literature about the practices and problems of these highly specialized computer users. We conducted a series of field studies in large corporate data centers, observing organizations, work practices, tools, and problem-solving strategies of system administrators. We found system administrators operate within large-scale, complex environments that present significant technical, social, cognitive, and business challenges. In this paper, we describe system administrator tool use in critical, high-cost, labor-intensive work through observational, survey, and interview data. We discuss our findings concerning administrator needs for coordinating work, maintaining situation awareness, planning and rehearsing complex procedures, building tools, and supporting complicated interleaved workflows.
Design Guidelines for System Administration Tools Developed through Ethnographic Field Studies
- Proc. 1st Symposium on Computer Human Interaction for Management of Information Technology
, 2007
"... Information Technology system administrators (sysadmins) perform the crucial and never-ending work of maintaining the technical infrastructure on which our society depends. Computer systems grow more complex every year, however, and the cost of administration is an ever increasing fraction of total ..."
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Information Technology system administrators (sysadmins) perform the crucial and never-ending work of maintaining the technical infrastructure on which our society depends. Computer systems grow more complex every year, however, and the cost of administration is an ever increasing fraction of total system cost – IT systems are growing harder to manage. To better understand this problem, we undertook a series of field studies of system administration work over the past four years, visiting a variety of enterprise and large university sites. One of our most compelling observations was how often the tools used by system administrators were not well aligned with their work practices. We believe that this misalignment was the result of administration tools designed without a complete understanding of the full context of administration work. To promote the design of better tools, this paper describes system administration work in more detail based on examples from our field studies, outlines the dimensions along which enterprise sysadmins differ significantly from other computer users, and provides a set of guidelines for tools to better support how administrators actually work.
Security Administrators: A Breed Apart
"... System administrators (sysadmins) are the linchpin of civilization, managing the Information Technology (IT) infrastructures on which modern life depends. Unfortunately, there has been a lack of research on sysadmin practices and consequently admin tools are often not designed to support their tasks ..."
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System administrators (sysadmins) are the linchpin of civilization, managing the Information Technology (IT) infrastructures on which modern life depends. Unfortunately, there has been a lack of research on sysadmin practices and consequently admin tools are often not designed to support their tasks effectively. Over the past five years, we conducted a series of field studies investigating the work practices and environments of admins managing several types of systems and infrastructures. We found that sysadmins are notably different from typical computer users in several dimensions. We also observed considerable variance among sysadmin specialties. Especially interesting are security administrators (secadmins), who act as detectives and intelligence agents to ensure that IT resources are used appropriately, preparing for and responding to attacks by human antagonists. In this paper we profile security administration work by analyzing tasks, tools, and practices in comparison to other system administration specialties. Our data suggests that the human element is a primary factor shaping the problems, environment, and work practices of security administration.
High-level Models of Software-management Interactions and Tasks for Gradual Transition Towards Autonomic Computing
"... Abstract—For making software systems autonomic, it is im-portant to understand and model software-management tasks. Each such task contains typically many interactions between the administrator and the managed software system. We propose to model software-management interactions and tasks in the for ..."
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Abstract—For making software systems autonomic, it is im-portant to understand and model software-management tasks. Each such task contains typically many interactions between the administrator and the managed software system. We propose to model software-management interactions and tasks in the form of discourses between the administrator and the software system. Such discourse models are based on insights from theories of human communication. This should make them “natural ” for humans to define and understand. While it may be obvious that such discourse models cover software-management interactions, we found that they may also represent major parts of the related tasks. So, these well-defined models of interactions and tasks as well as their operationalization allow their execution and automation. Based on this modeling approach, we propose a specific architecture for autonomic systems. This architecture facilitates gradual transition from human-managed towards au-tonomic systems. Index Terms—Self-managing systems; autonomic computing; interaction modeling I.
autonomic computing
"... modeling of software-management interactions and tasks for ..."
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"... Computer system administrators are the unsung heroes of the information age, working behind the scenes to configure, maintain, and troubleshoot the computer infrastructure that underlies much of modern life. However, little can be found in the literature about the practices and problems of these hig ..."
Abstract
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Computer system administrators are the unsung heroes of the information age, working behind the scenes to configure, maintain, and troubleshoot the computer infrastructure that underlies much of modern life. However, little can be found in the literature about the practices and problems of these highly specialized computer users. We conducted a series of field studies in large corporate data centers, observing organizations, work practices, tools, and problem-solving strategies of system administrators. We found system administrators operate within large-scale, complex environments that present significant technical, social, cognitive, and business challenges. In this paper, we describe system administrator tool use in critical, high-cost, labor-intensive work through observational, survey, and interview data. We discuss our findings concerning administrator needs for coordinating work, maintaining situation awareness, planning and rehearsing complex procedures, building tools, and supporting complicated interleaved workflows.
