Preface While system administrators often have many different goals, here are two that seem fairly universal: Automate the redundant tasks Hand off the simple tasks I’ve recently found that the build utility Jenkins can be a major boon for an Operations team, and wanted to share my findings with others. What is Jenkins? So, what exactly is Jenkins? It’s a popular fork of the open source continuous integration tool, Hudson. While it is normally used for building and deploying software, it can easily be used for more interesting purposes.

As a system administrator, monitoring is a key job responsibility, yet arguments seem to arise on how to implement it (usually with people who won’t be paged at 3am). Before writing this, I looked around for an article on the goals and philosophy of system monitoring, but found very little that really applied to this topic. Hopefully this will help set some expectations for admins, managers and stakeholders on what you should monitor, and why it should be monitored.