Summary

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The tactical aspect of the system manager's responsibility involves ensuring that an acceptable, efficient, and professional IT service is provided to the user community and that it then is maintained . The system manager must ensure that essential administration tasks are carried out. For junior administrators, a checklist approach is often useful because it ensures that the job gets done and also assists with the administrators' learning and familiarization.

Outages are becoming fewer as high availability is becoming a top priority for a large number of businesses. The system manager must be able to keep his customers informed of any outage status, whether due to a scheduled upgrade or a major, unexpected interruption to service. Tickertape systems and voice announcement facilities can be used to good effect when the normal means of communication are unavailable.

Performance monitoring is a large part of the system manager's responsibility. He must be able to identify potential bottlenecks and resolve them quickly to minimize the effect. Regular monitoring using Solaris tools such as vmstat, mpstat , iostat, and sar, for example, ensures that sufficient data is available for analysis as well as for periodic reports .

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