System Admin's Unit of Production?

RailGunSally writes "I am a (strictly technical) member of a large *nix systems admin team at a Fortune 150. Our new IT Management Overlord is a hardcore bean-counter from hell. We in the trenches have been tasked with providing 'metrics' on absolutely everything from system utilization to paper clip recycling. Of course, measuring productivity is right up there at the top of the list. We're stumped as to a definition of the basic unit of productivity for a *nix admin. There is a school of thought in our group that holds that if the PHBs are simple enough to want to operate purely from pie charts and spreadsheets, then we should just graph some output from /dev/random and have done with it. I personally love the idea, but I feel the need for due diligence, so I put the question to the Slashdot community: How does one reasonably quantify admin productivity?"

Comments

Unit of productivity

[orionpi]

Unit of Productivity = 1 / (hours of down time)

They are paying you to keep bad things from happening.

Metrics

[Codifex Maximus]

RailGunSally wrote:
>We in the trenches have been tasked with providing 'metrics' on absolutely everything from system utilization to paper clip recycling.

This pretty much says it all; your manager wants you to do HIS job. Shouldn't he develop his own metrics? He can ask you for ideas but he should do the work himself. As for metrics, I'd suggest downtime percentages for each machine. If the services are up and running and the machines are online providing service then that should be metrics enough.