DVC System Administrator Roles and Responsibilities Concept Map & Paper

Part 1 – System Administrator Roles and Responsibilities

Prior to beginning work on this discussion, read the content of the webpage titled System Admin Careers (Links to an external site.) and the document titled Chapter 1: An Introduction to System Administration (Links to an external site.).

Based upon these resources, the system administrator possesses a variety of skills, and can tackle many different projects, but is not an expert in any particular area. 

If you are just starting out in the IT field, use this discussion post to discuss the steps that you would take to prepare yourself to be able to do all the tasks a system administrator does.

 If you are already in the IT field, provide some advice on what steps a junior system administrator would take to be successful in the job, and how you stay current on new technologies and why it is important to do so.

 State whether you consider yourself a junior or senior system administrator and how many years you have in the IT field. 

Your post should be a minimum of 200 words.

Guided Response: Review several of your classmates’ posts, and respond to at least two of your peers by 11:59 p.m. on Day 7 of the week. 

You are encouraged to post your required replies early during the week to promote more meaningful interactive discourse in the discussion.

Critically assess your classmates’ posts, and suggest additional steps the learners could use as preparation for junior system administrators. 

If a specific learner is a senior system administrator, indicate whether you would be able to complete the steps provided and whether you believe it is important to stay current on new technologies.

 Your responses should be a minimum of 200 words each.

Part 2 – Concept Map and Documentation for Support of a Service: First Draft

Prior to beginning work on this interactive assignment, read the below chapters in the Limoncelli, Hogan, and Chalup (2017) text:

• Chapter 16: Service Requirements
• Chapter 17: Service Planning and Engineering
• Chapter 18: Service Resiliency and Performance Patterns
• Chapter 19: Service Launch: Fundamentals
• Chapter 20: Service Launch: DevOps
• Chapter 21: Service Conversions
• Chapter 22: Disaster Recovery and Data Integrity

As a reminder, interactive assignments are student led, with replies from the students rather than the instructor.  

For this interactive assignment, you will continue to work as lead system administrator for the fictions organization you used for the assignment in Week 1. You have tried unsuccessfully to locate the documentation for the existing services at the organization.

 While the existing team has done a really good job of performing the daily IT tasks, there have been occasional disruptions and outages. 

You believe the disruptions could have been kept to a minimum or even eliminated had there been documentation for the services. 

Since it is your job to ensure that all the services are reliable, you have decided to create documentation for one of the services.

For this interactive assignment, you are going to create a concept map and documentation for a service.

 You will begin by selecting a service that could be running at the organization. 

This week’s reading provides examples of services that are in a typical IT infrastructure (e.g., email, print, data storage, backup and restore). 

Other services not specifically discussed that are running at your organization would include domain name system (DNS) and dynamic host configuration protocol (DHCP), and there are many additional examples of services in the Limoncelli, Hogan, and Chalup (2017) textbook.

You are encouraged to look outside the Limoncelli, Hogan and Chalup textbook for this interactive assignment. If you have questions about whether a specific source is appropriate, please contact your instructor. Your instructor has the final say about the appropriateness of a specific source. You must document any information used from sources in APA Style as outlined in the Writing Center’s APA: Citing Within Your Paper (Links to an external site.) guide.

Concept Map

Create a concept map for your selected service that includes at least four specific components of a reliable service as discussed in your text.

For example, for email services, Limoncelli, Hogan, and Chalup (2017) point out that email systems require well-managed namespaces (Chapter 39), reliable nameservices (Chapter 40), service monitoring (Chapter 38), and backups (Chapter 44). Refer to the Email Service Concept MapDownload Email Service Concept Mapas an example. In this example, note that the concept map acts as an outline for the documentation that needs to be created, with each circle on the map representing the documentation that needs to be created to support the service.

The following three components must be included in your concept map:

• Policies
• Building
• Monitoring

Suggestions for additional components include the following:

• Reliability
• Centralization
• Performance
• Namespaces
• Documentation
• Simplicity
• Scaling
• Automation
• Redundancy
• Troubleshooting
• Access

Do not include the following components:

• Standards such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology Special Publication (NIST SP) 800 series, Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS), Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), or any other relevant standard in use in the industry.

Note: Limoncelli, Hogan, and Chalup (2017) include standards as a component of a reliable service. However, this topic will be covered in Week 3, so for this interactive assignment standards should not be included.

Documentation

In a separate document from the concept map, create documentation that provides details about each of the components you identified in your concept map.

For example, what protocols or open source software would be used in the building component? The details needed for each component should be at a high level. The details need to be specific enough that you could rebuild the service, if required. However, you do not want to provide step-by-step instructions on building the service. Any good system administrator would be able to locate these details from the vendor. You must include a minimum of one paragraph per component (four paragraphs minimum).

In your submittal,

• Attach your concept map and documentation.
• Briefly indicate the service and the components you have selected for the interactive assignment.

Part 3 – Revision of Concept Map and Documentation for Support of a ServicePrior to beginning work on this assignment, review the below chapters in the Limoncelli, Hogan, and Chalup (2017) text:

• Chapter 16: Service Requirements
• Chapter 17: Service Planning and Engineering
• Chapter 18: Service Resiliency and Performance Patterns
• Chapter 19: Service Launch: Fundamentals
• Chapter 20: Service Launch: DevOps
• Chapter 21: Service Conversions
• Chapter 22: Disaster Recovery and Data Integrity

Earlier this week, you completed the Concept Map and Documentation for Support of a Service: First Draft as part of an interactive assignment. For this assignment, you will revise your documents with any feedback you received from your peers. (Note: You are required to address feedback that was provided up to Day 5. Feedback from Days 6 and 7 may voluntarily be added to this assignment.) In addition, you will complete a reflection, which is described in the last bullet in the directives below. Please allow enough time to incorporate any feedback into this week’s final assignment, so that you do not miss the assignment submission deadline.

In your concept map,

• Develop a concept map for your selected service that includes at least four specific components of a reliable service as discussed in your text.
• Incorporate policies, building, and monitoring as three components of the at least four specific components of a reliable service that must be present.
• Incorporate peer feedback as appropriate into your concept map.

In your documentation,

• Document, in a separate document, the details about each of the components you identified in your concept map.
• Incorporate peer feedback as appropriate into your documentation.
• Explain how you incorporated the feedback from your peers into this draft of your concept map and documentation. If you did not use some portions of their feedback, explain why. Note that you will incorporate the instructor feedback you gain from this assignment into your final paper.