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Article from ADMIN 83/2024

By Ken Hess

Every system administrator wants to automate the tedious and mundane tasks they must perform regularly. But there's a dark side to automation, too.

The thrill and the threat of enterprise automation.

Every system administrator wants to automate the tedious and mundane tasks they must perform regularly. I love to automate the creation of HTML reports. I get a thrill out of creating timed scripts that fire off one after the other to perform elaborate tasks, such as moving or copying files, restarting services, downloading updates, performing system cleanup, archiving files, and so on. There's just something fun about putting things in motion and watching them work without intervention behind the scenes while I research new services, scan performance data, and worry about how much disk space everyone consumes. But there's a dark side to automation, too.

Is it just me, or do we struggle with automation? As you deduced from the paragraph above, I want to automate tasks, but I'm convinced there's a conspiracy to have me automate myself out of a job. I have visions of CXOs sitting around sipping 25-year-old Scotch, toasting, and discussing how they'll cast lots for my salary after I've trained our systems to care for themselves – at least to the point where some AI bot can handle, break, or fix things when they happen. Surely this scenario is my imagination getting the better of me, right? However, losing my job to Lisa, the virtual system administrator, is not the darkest aspect of automation. No, seriously, it isn't.

To me, the worst possible issue with automation is that, when something goes wrong – and it will – it's going to require someone to fix the problem. A human someone. Someone who may or may not be familiar with the systems, the intricate automation, or the problem itself. Think about it.

When you receive a call to fix several dozen systems that no longer deliver their promised functionality, where do you begin? Of course, you'll ask for the documentation. Documentation. That's a joke, right? You've met other system administrators, haven't you? You know that what little

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