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How Many Admins Per User/Computer Have You Seen?
miffo.swe writes "I'm trying to find the normal ratio of technicians/support tech per user or computer in your average IT-shop. When searching around, I can't find that many examples or any statistics. We manage around 900 computers (mostly Windows XP) and 25+ servers (mostly Linux). There are around 2600 users of varying knowledge, mostly pretty low. I can't find any statistics on this, so real-world examples are very welcome since we do this with one sysadmin (me) and two sneaker techs. Are we seriously understaffed, or is this normal?"
we're at around 1200 users and around 8 help desk people to support them all. 2 DBA's for 30 some MS SQL servers and 3-5 admins for 200 some windows/^nix servers. some people double by helping users in their office
Here's what we've had at different jobs:
Internal Corporate Helpdesk - 6800 users, supporting every application on desktops, 10 support techs during the day, 1 on nights and weekends.
Website support: 10,000 users, supporting general usage of just 1 website. 4 techs, regular business hours only.
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Right now its 4 offices around 120 employees and just me...oh and I forgot (or selectively blocked) a former client who keeps calling me to pick up after their new "IT guy" who is supposed to save them money. If they were all in one location I could probably juggle it better but as it is I'm starting to burn out.
This is party due to our lack of automation - Active Directory's not got much penetration outside our area, we haven't got automatic package rollouts/updates, no out-of-band management, and there's no planning WRT buying computers; each dept will buy a machine as funds & needs dictate, with input from us.
The three of us are desktop support. That doesn't count the sysadmins & netadmins.
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Government facility:
3000+ PCs
2600+ users(yeah I know we have more PCs than users)
200+ servers
6 Server Admins (understaffed)
2 Network Admins
2 Telecom Admins
3 Infrastructure techs
15 Helpdesk Technicians (overstaffed by about 5)
47 other IT employees for software support/dev staff and management staff
We have a small shop, we support around 150 users, all on XP boxes, 2 Windows Servers, and 2 Linux Servers, we have 3 of us in our shop including the IT Manager.
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It usually varies every place I've been between the quality/age of the hardware and the competency of the users. Additionally it depends on how automated the system is, and whether there's a dedicated support staff. Small places I've been I've find you can do about 45-75 comfortably... It was a bit stretched when it reached 100:1
Just my $0.02
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The larger the corporation the more per\user per\server to admin. Theseare my observation sover the last 12 years in my career:
For small corporations (less then 1 million) I usually see about 1/800 ratio for support\end user and 1/50 for servers.
For medium corporations (greater then 1 million but less then 80 million in revenue) I usually seea bour 1/2000 ratio and 1/150 for servers.
For large corporations (greater then 80 million) I see about 1/3800 and 1/250.
Support metrics are usually driven by "Call Times" including resolve times and hold times so depending on the scale of the businesses and nature it isn't so much support/staff ratio but rather hold time\support ratio. ITIL was crafted specifically to facilitate outsourcing Incident Management (password resets and all that less then 15 minutes crap) to lower cost, drill down labor and maintaining low hold times versus Problem Management which is the higher skill set.
Server ratio is largely due to "bucketing" of servers\apps to an admin resource (Think along the lines of an Account Rep). A.k.a Bob handles Apps A,B, and C along with Servers X, Y, and Z. So depending on the corporation you can have anywhere from 2-8 apps assigned to a single admin. Each application may maintain upwards of 5-12 servers depending on the size of the application. Smaller enterprises tend to have smaller "buckets". A typical LAMP stack may have 1-4 app servers, 1 NAS, 1 batch server, and possibly it's own database server. As you get larger those buckets share other buckets so you may have a team that handles just apache and another that handles just MYSQL\POSTGRES\etc. Those buckets can be huge. I have a team of 8 DBAs managing right now 2307 database instances. That is roughly 289 server instances per DBA. A simple table update may take 12 minutes for a structure update to process so median process time may factor into staffing requirements when concurrency isn't an option based on outage windows. Databases are virtual servers usually with a SAN hosted on hardware that is managed by another team but you can get the picture. By specializing administrative roles you can increase the nubmer of server or services supported by a person (power of scale) so the ratio of servers per tech tends to rise the bigger the corporation. In addition more expensive, comprehensive tools, become accessable to larger corporations (TIVOLI framework for instance.)
Based on your description you should need:
2 Call Center Incident Management crew
2 Problem Management crew
1 Senior Network Adminsitrator\Network Architect
3 Junior Network Administrators
1 of which is responsible for security\auditing
1 of which is responsible for maintenance
1 of which is special projects
All three should rotate these roles quarterly or annually as well as rotate 1 as a Problem Management staffer (the non-special project members)
So your total support crew should be about 8 people. You may also for off hours support want to outsource to a location 12 or 6 hours offset based on your location. (6 hours makes meetings more practical as you can usually get a meeting when one group is just getting in and the other is just getting ready to leave.)
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You need 1 IT staff (helpdesk, sysadmin, etc.) per:
20 Windows servers
50 Linux servers
100 full time computer users
1000 part time computer users
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
The number of admins needed in any shop depends on many factors, especially automation and duplication. In an ad-hoc environment where users are given free rein, you will need lots of admins. If management will support restrictions on users, the admins are creative and the necessary tools are purchased, then the job can be handled by a few astute individuals. If anyone knows of such a shop...
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I do the non-physical work on about 500 users and computers, and 15 or so servers not quite by myself (a couple union guys do any physical work). I spend most of my day browsing slashdot with little to do, other than maintaining those servers, or when something goes seriously wrong on a machine. That's because the vast majority of the user's machines are locked down pretty hard (many don't even get icons on their desktop), and they only run a couple programs, which means there is almost nothing for them to screw up. The engineers tend to get themselves into more trouble, since their machines aren't locked down, but there are only a handful of them so it's no big deal (and they are smart, so they often fix their own problems).
It pretty much all depends on your environment. I could envision a case where 200 users, 50 computers, and 2-3 servers per head is ideal, but in most well-run environments that would be extreme over-kill. Bump it up to about 500 computers and 10-20 servers per head and I think you're in the average ballpark for a decent IT group, and you could raise that a bit more if everyone is in the same building. These days it's rare to have more than one user per computer.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
It depends on how many Windows desktops you are able to replace with Macintosh OS X, Solaris or Linux. Seriously. Windows isn't around because of it's technical merits.
I have worked in help desk environments in the past for a Windows / Macintosh / Solaris computing environment. The Solaris users largely took care of themselves, but contacted us for some settings information, like establishing the right settings for Kerberos, LDAP, AFS, or SMTP. The Mac users outnumbered everyone else by at least 4 to 1. However, it was the Windows users that wasted about 80% of our time for drop in help. Even cloned setups on identical hardware had different problems. Drivers were a big one. For phone calls, it was a bit higher in number of Windows user contacts but a bit shorter in duration for each one.
I did family tech support for years until I had enough and bought anyone who was willing new Apples. Only my mom took me up, but her support calls dropped off to nothing within days and now we can talk about other things for a change.
I've visited and toured libraries and schools using LTSP. One of those was stuck with some windows machines. The effort to keep the few Windows machines going was about, from their statistics, about 14:1 compared to LTSP. That ratio would probably been higher if they had even higher ration of Linux stations. The others cited even more favorable rates.
Getting rid of Windows is mostly a psychological problem. First, users have to become familiar enough with computers to be able to do their daily tasks. Having knowlegeable staff on the spot to nudge in the right direction is essential, as is encouraging peer support. Then they need to keep access to the Windows machines and try to do on Windows what they can do on computers. Then they eventually decide on their own, 'fuck it' regarding the Windows use and drop it without looking back.
The real question is are you always constantly working your ass off, fixing stupid problems - and therefore unable to do anything more productive? If so, then it seems you don't have enough people.
Setting the 'right' staffing levels, then depends on how much you can clean up the computing environment. I for one am offended that so much money and time is wasted just trying get the M$ stuff to work as well as its competitors. I would much rather see the same number of staff hours used not for support but for improvement and making things faster, easier, more productive. Before Windows, IT used to save effort rather than a live demo of the Red Queen's Race!
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
1 tech to 100 users seems extraordinarily high, I've never worked in an environment with that many support techs. I've worked in a locked-down environment with about 3,000 users and 5 help desk personel as the sole non-server support, and I've worked in an environment with 5 desktop techs for about 4,000 users (not very restricted) with a remote help desk for trivial matters (anything that takes less than 5 minutes to fix, basically). I currently work on a separated network for the second company, I'm the remote support for about 500 users and I make sure the engineers don't break the 10-15 servers under my control. There are a couple union guys that handle any physical work, but it is definitely not the major portion of their work, and there is no other support outside of the union guys and me.
Your environment has to be a complete mess if you need 1 desktop tech per 100 windows machines. I could see it for a Linux setup if it's your first go of it, I imagine your IT department would need a few years to streamline things to get that number down, but really, windows is easy. If you need that many you're probably doing it wrong.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
Sounds like you're using wrong, then.
We use Citrix as a barrier between sensitive networks. We have a corporate network, a buffer network, and a sensitive network. Citrix servers sit in the buffer network allowing users on the corporate network to access the sensitive network without having any direct link between the two. It works pretty well, since we can lock down the buffer network to only allow the citrix connections and a few outside connections for things like AV and MS updates.
As far as using Citrix to do real work on a day to day basis without such high security requirments, I've always thought it was a terrible idea. My company wants to do more of it though, and I can't understand why. A new laptop is about $600 and should last 2-3 years. Support per laptop is probably another $100 a year, for grand total of $900. I can't see the extra bandwidth and citrix licensing used up by a user working off of a citrix connection costing less than that over three years. Plus the fact that the user still needs a laptop, and if you make him buy it himself he's just going to charge you more for his services. So the only potential savings really is in software licensing, but if the users are working day in and day out on the same apps, always using up a citrix connection, then you aren't really saving anything as you still need that many licenses. It makes no sense to me, and you've drasticly increased your server side support needs.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
I suspect his statement is true in most large real-world environments: a proliferation of Unix server flavors, a rigidly standardized Windows desktop, and an SLA that only promises what the capabilities of the group policy system, and the Windows package management system, can deliver (there is no "Windows installer system": the Microsoft-official thing is the open-source WiX toolkit).
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