Google for SysAdmins

May 5th, 2008 javier

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately talking to the management team here at Hyperic about the subject of search. Specifically, Google search since its what most of our users tend to find us with. (No disrespect to our good friends at Ask.com whose search engine seems to be less popular with the sysadmin crowd).

Perhaps the greatest irony of working in the management software business is the fact that the problems our products solve are the same ones that keep people from finding us. After all, who has time to look for new software when you’re busy fighting fires, right?

This is the reason why we’ve historically made such a big deal about the role search plays in helping people find Hyperic. Interestingly, people dont tend to search explicitly for Hyperic… instead they search for things like:

- “total nursery size weblogic”

- “how to find replication transactions in mssql 2005″

- “exchange 2003 monitor total ops per user”

- “freebsd open files per process”

Each one of these items (found in our huge search logs) came from someone out there, looking to troubleshoot a problem with part of their infrastructure. Even more interesting, each of these search results points to either documentation about the problem, a reference to someone else looking for the answer, or a product that can help you find the answer (namely ours!). This pattern repeats itself thousands of times a day and is a key part of how more and more people will find out about HQ and how it might help them.

Google’s search engine has proved to be the best tool for people to use to solve these problems not just by finding software, but by pointing them at the potential answers to some potentially obscure questions. The skill of going from an obscure error message in your Apache logs to a solution to a production issue is essential in any web ops or admin role these days and your success rate is highly dependent on how well you construct the query in the first place.

It’s also an incredibly important skill for developers. I’ve long maintained that the skill that Doug (our CTO/co-founder) has for finding references to poorly documented management APIs or references to strange errors (here’s looking at you, Webs-Fear) is one of our many secret weapons.

That skill itself is a key ingredient for success of sysadmins, and even developers and something I would argue should be measured as part of the interviewing process for either position. Seems reasonable, right? Talk to any of our developers (or folks who have interviewed here) and they’ll tell you we have a pretty grueling interview process with a lot of code-related questions. It’d be great if companies could develop an equally useful method to measure how effective a candidate may be at finding the answer to some challenging troubleshooting questions.

I’m curious if anyone has figured out a way to measure and evaluate this skill as part of their interviewing process… perhaps one day we’d have a whole methodology for testing this like we test for coding skills.

Entry Filed under: HQ, IT Industry, Javiers Blog