I have been thinking for a long time what makes a good support person and sets them apart from the rest. Much like a master craftsman or artisan it is the tools that he uses and the techniques he applies to day to day tasks that make a difference. Much of this comes with experience and from other master craftsmen in the field and has little to do with methodologies and frameworks such as ISO 9001 and ITIL.
Don't get me wrong these methodologies have their place, but having pride in what you do and knowing what tools are available to you make a whole lot of difference. In IT there are varying tools for sifting and mining for our life blood, that is information. We are information workers so a lot of the time it is not so much what you already know so much as how fast you can find the information and assimilate it. As expected the Web holds a wealth of this, we are also sometimes referred to as Google wranglers. It may seem like cheating to go ask the mighty Google but at the end of the day users generally want their email up faster than being interested in your pride.
Speaking of pride, don't be afraid to ask co-workers for help, even if only to bounce ideas off or to perform a sanity check, a second pair of eyes on a problem is a always a good approach. There is a balance though relying on others to solve the issues in your support queue does not win friends and influence people. As we IT support staff know there is never enough hours in the day and the stress never stops.
So being able to find things out for yourself is a great skill to develop, if when trekking up the proverbial mountain to the resident guru to ask a question and the response is "what problem solving have you done to this point?" it is good to be armed with answers. It will certainly go a long way to assist your guru in helping to point you in the right direction (after all a good guru would never just give you the answer, how would you learn anything if they did?) and earn some IT brownie points in the process.
Logs are a great place to start, I don't mean those things lumber companies produce, I am talking about the various log files, binary or text, produced by computer systems and the applications they run. As you would expect on a Windows system from desktop to enterprise level server cluster the go to place is the event logs (Start/Run/Compmgmt.msc is the fastest way to get there, yes I know you could run eventvwr.msc but with computer management you have other useful tools all in one place). The two mainstay logs to look at here are System and Application.
System funnily enough is where all system activity happens, on most systems this will be things to do with services and disk subsystems. Application is where, you guessed it, applications are supposed to log information, warnings and errors. Generally well behaved applications do. There can also be specialised application logs created just for information from that application (Enterprise Vault springs to mind).
Other logs are also created such as the W3C logs on windows systems, sure you can open these up in good old dumb notepad and go log diving but there are better solutions out there such as Log Parser, this is a versatile tool for querying logs of all types and descriptions.
Another great skill to develop is finding what is on a given network or domain, it is good to be able to connect to a server and figure out the domain and networking information from there. A couple of good tools (again Windows, but then again I am mainly a Windows system administrator) are nltest (built into most Windows domain controllers and IPScan (caution some anti virus solutions may flag this as malware). IPScan will tell you what devices are on a given subnet range and also the ports open on these if you configure it so. Nltest will allow you to find out the domain controllers or global catalog servers for a given domain. Being able to find things out when there is either no documentation or someone to ask will go a long way to making you professional and relied on.
Being on the look out for new and cool tools is something a good system administrator should constantly be doing. When you find one you should put it in your toolbox ready to use in the right situation. Like a trusty screwdriver or Leatherman multi-tool, it may even save the day, or at least the bosses email.
I could not finish without mentioning one set of tools every Windows sys admin should know and use, even those starting out. These being the tools and utilities from Sysinternals. These should form the core of your toolbox along with the tools built in to Windows. Download a copy today plus you can always stay current with the Sysinternals Live option.
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