Is IT Infrastructure Like House?

Ever watch the TV show, House?  I recently started watching the current series and have spent a good deal of this weekend watching the first series.  The more I watched it, the more I thought what was happening on screen was kind of like being a senior systems administrator, without the guts’n’gore.

• We sometimes face patients (users) who complain of issues that will bring an end to civilisation but are really minor or non-existent.
• Rule #2 of my IT bible seems to be the recurring message in the show: Users lie!  “Did you install or change something?”  The answer is always no.  Just like case histories in the show.
• Systems are forever becoming more intertwined and complex, e.g. an issue with a DHCP address can cause DFS Namespace file shares to become intermittently unavailable – I’ve had that one.  Diagnosing these issues requires understanding the fundamentals of many technologies and figuring out this technological organism ticks.  When you understand why when a DHCP address that was used by a domain controller during it’s build (and released during the subsequent shipment to another site) is retaken up by a PC and the DNS recrods (A and SRV) are still left behind of that travelling DC lead to a random failure (the percentage is 1/number of DC’s left in the site+1) then you might start to see how lung cancer can lead to a sore foot and brain malfunction.
• Diagnostics tools or “labs” help us do our job.  They sound boring but tools like Windows Event Viewer, ProcMon, FileMon, and RegMon are our biopsies and blood tests in the IT world.  We can discover the symptoms and causes of issues with these tools.  The better the tools, e.g. OpsMgr, the more we can detect and the earlier we can detect those issues/resolutions.
• We need to continue to learn new skills; being successful at our job is more than just finishing school or some apprenticeship.  Heck, even attending a training course once a year is not enough.  I read blogs every day, read books, attend seminars, user group sessions, watch webcasts and conferences in order to keep my self up to date and could easily triple that if I had the time.

Those who’ve worked with me will also find it funny that House has the same soft touch that I do with people 😉  I’m just a great big ol’ teddy bear!