Five Daily Tasks YOU Should Be Doing as a System Administrator

hey there YouTube welcome to my channel my name is Alex Hubbard I'm a senior systems administrator with over 15 years of experience in the IT industry I'm starting a new series on my channel called 5-minute Fridays where we pick a topic and discuss it for roughly 5 minutes today's topic 5 things you should be doing daily as a systems administrator the first thing that I check when I get in the morning I fire up my outlook client I take a look at my alerts these are things that came in overnight that are my first indication of something might have went bump in the night I'm a small business admin we don't have a knock or anything like that you know as a small business admin you typically you're either a 1 or 2 man shop and that's it so you have to rely on your alerts and your logs and that's the first thing that I check I have my outlook set up to create different rules to put you know different applications software hardware etc into different folders so that they don't get lost and I can review them first thing in the morning you can also set your devices to send you a text message or some kind of alert slack teams etc so that's the first thing that I go after before I look at any tickets before I look at any email email correspondence I go after my alerts if everything looks good there I move on to my log files I checked my firewall logs my access logs my VPN logs things of that nature that's what you want to go after next if you have a central logging server a syslog server seemed something along those lines that helps you consolidate and centralize all of your logs that's huge most probably small businesses and small business admins don't have the resources for something like that so a lot of this is manual but it is very critical that you check your logs on a daily basis because that is also another indicator that you could have something wrong on your network somebody could be could be attempting to compromise or has already compromised your network it's a second place I look for things that might have happened overnight or during the day etc if everything looks good in my log files I move on my backup appliance this could be a physical appliance of virtual appliance it really doesn't matter even if you don't get any alerts from it log into it put your eyes on it make sure all your jobs ran appropriately and nothing stuck nothing's hung you don't necessarily have to test a restore daily that'll be in - in another video we'll talk about that but put your eyes on it make sure it's functioning properly if that looks good move on to your endpoint protection system your antivirus system there are some very advanced ones out there CrowdStrike carbon black silence things of that nature that will do more than just remediating points I am a CCFA CrowdStrike certified Falcon Administrator I'm fairly comfortable with the CrowdStrike platform it's more advanced than just your typical endpoint antivirus system you can configure it to tell you if there's any unauthorized USB devices failed logins things of that nature so when you check your endpoint security application or system you know make sure all your hosts are connected make sure there are no errors or failed logins or things of that nature you know just go through it and you know put your eyes on it if everything looks good there the last the fifth thing you should be doing daily is checking your update or patch management system this could be something like Microsoft wsus or Auto mocks or there's a couple of other ones out there that will do the same thing log into it make sure all your hosts are patch make sure there are no errors contacting the update server if you do find any errors and this also goes for your endpoint protection - you can either assign that assign assign a ticket to your helpdesk tech or if you're a solo you know one-man band you know make sure you remediate these issues so that your endpoints are protected you know they're fully patched and everything's up to date there's no there's no issues with endpoint security so those are five things that I check on a daily basis that you should be checking as Systems Administrator so hopefully this video helped you guys out this is my this is my first 5-minute Friday video it's gonna come out this Friday if you liked it please you know leave me a comment below thumbs-up thumbs-down subscribe turn on your post notifications a little bell in the corner I have over 15 years of experience in the IT industry if there's something you want to see leave me a comment below and I'll see if I can help you out so thanks for watching guys stay tuned for more IT related videos

Channel: Alexander Hubbard

Views: 12,821

Keywords: help desk, job skills, top it job skills, system administrator, sysadmin, systems, administrator, system, systems administrator, system administrator daily tasks, alex hubbard, achubbard.com, alexander hubbard, backup, logs, log files, alerts, system administrator tasks, system administrator job, systems admin, what does a system administrator do, windows, admin, network, microsoft, smb, support, information technology, help desk career

Id: bvWniN5cfLQ

Length: 4min 56sec (296 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 10 2020