Proactive Administration

Throughout my nearly 40-year career in IT, not only as a developer but primarily in operations, I have worked with a wide variety of people, each of whom had their own way of managing hardware and software components.

It is unnecessary to reinforce the idea that everything of importance needs to be constantly monitored, and there are countless tools for this. However, monitoring tools typically serve to alert us that something is wrong, whether it be hardware or software failures that sometimes make systems fully or partially unavailable. When this occurs, we have what we call an “incident.”

An incident occurs whenever a system component malfunctions or prevents the functioning of the system as a whole. Some types of incidents, such as hardware failures, cannot be avoided because natural wear and tear is part of the nature of certain components. Nevertheless, we can create redundant and resilient systems, where each component can be accompanied by a replica that takes over in the event of a failure in the main component or even shares the workload, minimizing wear.

But can we not predict when these failures will occur? The answer to this question is “Yes, we can!” When we anticipate a software or hardware failure, we can calmly plan the component’s replacement and schedule the intervention at the most convenient time—either because the component is not in use or during a period of lower utilization, where the impact of a system interruption causes the least possible damage. This anticipatory concern is what I call “Proactive Administration”.