I was asked the question recently what maintenance tasks a Server administrator should carry out to keep their IT infrastructure running smoothly. As well as examples in the article, check out the Server Administrator Tasks Excel download at the end of the article.
After looking at the infrastructure I broke it down into various sections, Servers, Switches and Firewalls, Active Directory and I also decided to break it further down into the line of business applications such as Exchange and Citrix.
A server administrators maintenance schedule is then broken down into daily task, weekly tasks and monthly tasks. A daily task can consists of simple things such as checking backups, AV updates and fault LEDS etc.
| Servers | Check Server Room Physically – Temps | |
| Check AV Updates | ||
| Check AV Scan Success | ||
| Check Daily Backups | ||
| Check Hardware Fault LEDS | ||
| Check Event Logs – Application/Server | ||
A weekly task in exchange may consist of checking DB size, liasing with users o see what issues they have, check event logs etc.
| Exchange | Check DB Size and Compare to MAX DB Limits | |
| Manage Whitelist/Blacklists – Spam | ||
| Check DB Volume free space and compare | ||
While a monthly task may be more involved such as implementing the latest application patches, removing stale DNS records and removing old Active Directory users.
| Active Directory | Purge/Disable old users | |
| Purge old groups | ||
| Check NetDiag report | ||
| Check DCDiag Report | ||
| Scavenge DNS |
Additionally you may add a further timescale to your schedule such as yearly firmware updates.
Server Administrator Maintenance Tasks Download