How do I manage my time. My employer is not a large enterprise, but they are growing rapidly. The IT department is stretched thin. There’s over 800 “server” classed objects in Active Directory, I personally know of 40 SQL Server servers, 30 of which are “Production”. I probably have over 200 applications that are connected into these SQL Servers. And yet last week and this I found my time torn between trying to get our Monitoring System back operational for the entire infrastructure and pulled into security audits for File Shares and a single application that uses SQL Server to store file locations of engineering CAD drawings. Sure, at my company those files are our IP, our bread-and-butter, our “Family Jewels”, but at the same time we had a major outage for Sharepoint and a system that we sell to our customers. The Sharepoint outage was a SAN volume that filled up from outside into the LUN, and took the LUN offline. The other outage was a LUN running out of space due to a weekly index rebuild filling up a TLOG drive.

Both would have been easily preventable, if I had the time to be proactive and spend two hours on Friday reviewing system health reports. Instead I spent my time fixing SLA reports and internet web status Macros for our Monitoring solution, and then in meetings on how we have 78 logins that are Domain Administrators in our primary domain. Couple that with the report I typed up saying “Yes we can turn on successful and failed login auditing, and set up minimum password requirements for SQL Logins”, and you see why I didn’t have time to ensure the index rebuilds would blow up to take grow the TLOG to 300% of normal size. Just ignore the fact that the IT organization turns deaf, dumb, and mute when someone mentions an SLA, or DR, or BC.

Any suggestions other than “Dice, Monster, Update Resume”?