Modern System Administration

Chapter 17. Monitor Your Work

Do not confuse things that are hard with things that are valuable. Many things in life are hard. Just because you are giving a great effort does not mean you are working toward a great result.

James Clear

Across my career in operations engineering, I’ve experienced a challenge that stymies many in our industry: inadequate visibility. It is frustrating to have my impact minimized or misunderstood; finding the right narrative takes having the right metrics to tell that story. And, I haven’t ever seen lines of code or the number of resolved issues as quality metrics to show my impact.

As an industry, we are starting to recognize the importance of sustainable systems. A system’s health affects an individual’s health, and their health in turn can impact the managed systems. In this chapter, I show the importance of monitoring your work so you can improve your effectiveness—much like your managed systems. The result is improving your consistency and reliability and achieving sustainable outcomes—for the system and yourself.

Why Should You Monitor Your Work?

Monitoring your work is about explicitly coordinating and collaboratively identifying appropriate and valuable work. In addition, visualizing the data you collect about your work helps you show your work in context versus using a list of completed tasks and projects.

Unfortunately, external pressures may push you to work on the wrong things or the right things at the wrong time. Sometimes you may ...