For planned outages see: https://rules.ssw.com.au/have-a-server-reboot-restart-policy
During your course of being a SysAdmin, you will come across many outages. Some of them will impact BAU (Business as usual) and others will just be minor service outages. Do you know what to do you have a plan in the event of these outages?
Below is a process for these types of outages. Some amount of common sense is required here, an outage would be if services that would affect BAU work are disrupted for SSW and/or some hardware has failed.
Hardware Outage:
- Firewall
- Switch
- Blade Servers
- SAN Storage
- UPS
Service Outage:
- Active Directory Domain Services
- O365 Services; Teams, SharePoint, Exchange, OneDrive
- File Servers
- SQL Servers
- IIS Servers
Determining What Services are Disrupted
At SSW we use WhatsUp Gold for our device monitoring, however, there are many tools for this, Solarwinds, SCOM, etc
- Login to monitoring service
- Check to see what services are down
First Contact
After you have determined what services have been disrupted it is time to call your SysAdmin team and organise a quick conference call. This will allow you to have a discussion prior to making any changes/fixes that could cause the outage to become worse.
Key Discussion Points:- What services have been disrupted?
- What is the impact of these services?
- Is an email to everyone in your company required?
- What are your next steps?
What if you cannot reach anyone?
If you cannot reach anyone move onto the Email section.
Email
If from the previous discussion you have determined that an email needs to be sent to your entire company, or you have decided this is necessary if you cannot contact anyone above, send an email in the following format:
To: ALL
Subject: Outage Notice
Hey All,
We are experiencing an outage and the following services have been affected:
· Xxx
· Yyy
· Zzz
We are working on restoring these services and will keep you updated.
Thank you,
SysAdmins
A separate email needs to be sent to SysAdmins outlining what was discussed on the call. If no one was contactable, please proceed with what you have determined on your own.
To: SysAdmins
Subject: SysAdmins – Outage Notice
Hey team,
As per our conversation.
The following services are disrupted:
· Xxx
· Yyy
· Zzz
The impact of these services disrupted are:
· Xxx
· Yyy
· Zzz
We have decided that an email to ALL is/is not required.
To myself,
The next steps to resolving this are:
1. Xxx
2. Yyy
3. Zzz
Thank you,
SysAdmin
Next Steps did *not* resolve the issue
If you have completed your tasks but the issue has not resolved, please try to make contact with the SysAdmin team again and send an updated To Myself email.
Next Steps resolved the issue
If your actions have resolved the issue, please notify ALL of the services being restored and update your To Myself email.