What are some system administration best practices? If someone is running a production web server, what are the basic things they should be doing?
5th March 2012
My answer to What are some system administration best practices? If someone is running a production web server, what are the basic things they should be doing? on Quora
Graph everything. I’m not a good sysadmin, but one thing I’ve learned from working with with good sysadmins is that they spend a bunch of time looking at graphs.
A graph showing CPU usage, load average, disk operations per second, network traffic etc over the past day/week/month makes any strange behaviour really easy to spot.
I’ve found munin relatively easy to set up, and there are hosted services like Cloudkick that can help out as well.
More recent articles
- Phoenix.new is Fly's entry into the prompt-driven app development space - 23rd June 2025
- Trying out the new Gemini 2.5 model family - 17th June 2025
- The lethal trifecta for AI agents: private data, untrusted content, and external communication - 16th June 2025