System Administrator roles and responsibilities

System Administrator roles and responsibilities

The System Administrator is responsible for managing an organization's computer and operating systems, for the day-to-day maintenance of the operating system, including backup and recovery, adding and deleting user accounts, and performing software upgrades, and for installing, configuring, and maintaining the network. They work closely with the Database Administrator and Application and Business Expert to fix problems and increase performance and ensures that all current operating system patches are applied.
The System Administrator performs the following responsibilities:

Errors

        Always checks system logs with error timestamp to see if it was caused by a system error
            For example: IBM® InfoSphere® Master Data Management Server for Product Information Management reporting system error saving a file to docstore should result in the System Expert checking the system logs to see if it is an IO problem or disk full or file system problem.

Monitor

        Monitors all system errors and critical system messages
        Checks for disk space getting full

Performance

        When performance problems arise determines IO bandwidth, memory, swapping, and CPU usage to see if there is a bottleneck in the current hardware setup
        Checks for the existence of zombie or defunct processes and determines cause of freeze

Client PCs

        Determines if different software packages on PC might be causing a problem
            If cannot determine, then remove all non standard packages and see if problem goes away
        Tracks modifications to all PC settings to determine if a problem was caused by configuration changes
            For example: Internet Explorer and network settings

Network

        Configures and maintains load balancer (if applicable) and knows when it may be the cause of a problem
            For example: if unexpectedly logged out of the system, correlates time of the problem with load balancer logs to see if cause was load balancer
            Might bypass load balancer completely for a period of time to see if it fixes a problem
        Configures and maintains proxy server
            If using a proxy server ensures all relevant proxy server http caches are flushed when a IBM InfoSphere Master Data Management Server for Product Information Management patch is installed
        Monitors network bandwidth