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A Day in the Life of a Quality Engineering SysAdmin


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I was neither hired nor trained to be a SysAdmin. I am a Senior Software Engineer in Test at Red Hat. As one of our previous senior software engineers departed to take on another role, I ended up becoming a SysAdmin who is working partly as a software engineer in testing.

With that background, I'll explain what my day looks like.

Every day when I come in, I check our monitoring system's dashboard to see if any of our 50 most important hosts are complaining regarding the over 490 checks that are running. If anything is wrong, I try to fix it, or I delegate the task to someone who can fix it. When things are not complaining, I try to improve our current setup, write more comprehensive automation to monitor the infrastructure, and think about how to automate remediation of things when they are broken or complaining.

What I mean by complaining is really an alert sent by our monitoring tool about the state of a given host or service.

From Red Hat
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