Systems administrator (monitoring server estate) — telecoms

The second half of the post, held alongside application support from the arrival in August 2017: the server estate carrying the monitoring applications. The hire was aimed at a profile mixing development, infrastructure and networking; the two hats were held simultaneously from day one.

More than forty RedHat and HP-UX servers — ten Oracle databases, twenty-eight application servers. A clear line between the two scopes: direct intervention on the non-production environments; in production the machines are held by an operator with a deputy for each application, and the role here is to direct the resolution.

The applications are committed to a silver service level, meaning more than 99 % availability across the year, and the daily work follows from it: handling filesystem alerts, watching performance, purging files, extending tablespaces, restarting services, running application liveness tests. The estate is also uneven on the vendor side — one application on Netrac Gold 5, the others on versions 7 and 8. Netrac is TEOCO's network service assurance solution, the common platform of the six applications. That version debt would lead, three years later, to the two renovation studies towards Helix.