32 Questions to judge whether your Sysadmin Team is wonderful!

The Limoncelli Test: 32 Questions for Your Sysadmin Team

Updated: 2011-07-25

• . Public facing practices:
• . Are user requests tracked via a ticket system?
• . Are "the 3 empowering policies" defined and published?
• . Does the team record monthly metrics?
• . Modern team practices:
• . Do you have a "policy and procedure" wiki?
• . Do you have a password safe?
• . Is your team's code kept in a source code control system?
• . Does your team use a bug-tracking system for their own code?
• . In your bugs/tickets, does stability have a higher priority than new features?
• . Does your team write "design docs"?
• . Do you have a "post-mortem" process?
• . Operational practices:
• . Does each service have an OpsDoc?
• . Does each service have appropriate monitoring?
• . Do you have a pager rotation schedule?
• . Do you have separate development, QA, and production systems?
• . Do roll-outs to many machines have a "canary process"?
• . Automation practices:
• . Do you use configuration management tools like cfengine/puppet/chef?
• . Do automated administration tasks run under role accounts?
• . Do automated processes that generate email only do so when they have something to say?
• . Fleet management practices:
• . Is there a database of all machines?
• . Is OS installation automated?
• . Can you automatically patch software across your entire fleet?
• . Do you have a PC refresh policy?
• . "We acknowledge that hardware breaks" practices:
• . Can your servers keep operating even if 1 disk dies?
• . Is the network core N+1?
• . Are your backups automated?
• . Are your disaster recovery plans tested periodically?
• . Do machines in your data center have remote power / console access?
• . Security practices:
• . Do desktops/laptops/servers run self-updating, silent, anti-malware software?
• . Do you have a written security policy?
• . Do you submit to periodic security audits?
• . Can a user's account be disabled on all systems in 1 hour?
• . Can you change all privileged (root) passwords in 1 hour?

PS. These Questions was made buy limoncelli, a Sysadmin at Google.

fortunately, our team achieve many of them,such as incident management, security management.

we are learning to use Chef/puppet to manage our system configurations.

OK, that's all Wish it can help you, especially when you need judge on sys job offer.

The original  article is here:

and it has many interpretations for each question.