"A good SysAdmin would spend that time researching security hardening techniques, scanning for vulnerabilities, and taking performance metrics to see what needs to be replaced to make things run faster. In the case of a smaller, or growing business, they should be interacting with the users of the system to find out what tools they use, or avoid, and why they enjoy, or avoid those tools. They would also ask things like what takes the majority of that person's time, what slows them down, and if there was anything they wish their system could do better. From that information they would research alternate tools to help the other workers spend their time more efficiently, and make their jobs easier."
Sounds like an IT systems administrator is the IT version of a maintenance mechanic.
I've been an independent IT contractor for 12+ years and have been focusing on systems administration for the past 2-4. I have quite a bit of technical experience and knowledge, but most of my work has been task-oriented. That is - I'm hired to perform a task and when that task is completed, the job is done. In a few cases I had long-term contracts that covered routine maintenance, which mostly amounted to installing updates and fixing stuff when it broke. After 9 or so months of a contract handling sys admin trouble tickets (filling in for an admin who went on maternity leave and then resigned), I accepted a regular position at this company and now I'm feeling rather lost. Even more so, now that I have to write up a 20 page report documenting how I've met objectives over the past quarter.
It seems that being an ordinary sys admin (vs being a contracted sys admin) is a lot more than fixing stuff when it breaks and running updates and the occasional upgrade project. And I'm at a loss trying to figure out what the "more" is.
Specifically, on a team of admins, I'm responsible for Active Directory including the DCs, DNS, DHCP, also Citrix XenApp and several monitoring applications. All of these systems are operating beautifully. All of the servers I manage are virtualized in VMWare with high availability and nary a hiccup happens with any of it. So what am I supposed to do with my time?
