Reporting To Executives

chopsuei3 writes "As a System Administrator, I am charged with providing more insight into the functioning of the system. What types of reports and information do other System Administrators submit to executives and on what frequency? Measurements such as uptime and average page latency are useful, but our site is relatively stable and we see minimal downtime, so I'm looking for other important and useful information I can report up to better illustrate my efforts. Our system is also unique in that about 70% of the traffic we see is from devices and not human browsers. I am a lone System Administrator in a 20-person company which specializes in web-based irrigation management. I also simultaneously perform all IT-related tasks in the office, which may also be important to report up to executives on regular basis."

Dear Slashdot....

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear Slashdot, How do I do my job? Sincerely, Chop Suey

Oblig...

[Stenchwarrior]

"What types of reports and information do other System Administrators submit to executives and on what frequency?"

TPS reports, of course!

Now bring on the Redundant Mod!

Coming of Age

[yttrstein]

It's always heartwarming to see a Sysadmin ascend to the point where they begin to slowly realize that justification for their salary is going to have to involve some lying.

Provide market data.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Collect the amount of water pumped reported by each sensor as a trace between 9:30 AM and 4PM on the days the market is open. Find the correlation between this trace and the S&P500 index with a two minute time lag. See which sensor has a correlation coefficient more than 0.05. Use that info to come up with a trading strategy to buy and sell the exchange traded fund IVV. Propose a project find the leading indicator sensor for more securities like QQQQ, Diamond, XLF, XLU, XLV, XLP and the stock ANSS. Upper management is mostly made up of idiots who fall for such things. Build an empire under you. Watch the cash flow of the company. Just before it goes bust, put all this experience in a resume and get a job in the ultra high speed trading division of Morgan Stanley.

throw the dead cat in the neighbors yard

[SethJohnson]

This is a one-off idea, but you could meet with marketing and ask for a list of the various campaigns they've launched over the past year. Then you could parse the web server logs to see where traffic was coming from during the dates of those campaigns. It would give execs a metric by which to measure the effectiveness of the marketing efforts. This is important, because as your ship sinks, the execs will look to you for help in determining the ballast that needs to be dumped.

Seth

Re:If you are worried

[nomadic]

If you are concerned about supporting the reasoning behind the existence of your job, it is time to depart.

Never a better time than moving now, the job market is BOOMING...

Re:Here's an idea...

[Hognoxious]

I'd also suggest maybe mocking up 2 or 3 examples and letting them see.

Mocking up? You might as well just make it up. Stick a few trekkish terms in there - quasitron throughput and such - and see if anyone bites.

They won't.

Re:No questions allowed.

[wisty]

Yeah. If random people on the internet come up with a stupid answer, you don't have to listen.

Re:Here's an idea...

[IICV]

Most of it is working, and it has had some nice side benefits (now, anyone can email anyone else anywhere on the planet).

Finally, e-mail can start making headway against the telegraph!