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?"

Comments

Over 9000

[Anonymous Coward]

Over 9000

Re:Over 9000

[Verdatum]

But with the blast shield down I can't even see! How am I supposed to fix IT issues?

Re:Over 9000

[Nick Number]

Your users can deceive you. Don't trust them.

Let go your professional self and act on instinct.

Re:Over 9000

[TheCarp]

I think it comes down to "what do you mean by admins"?

The more you restrict what admins have to support, the more homogenous the environment, the better the ratio. The more you expect from them, the more complex the environment, the more you need.

Another factor to add in is tools. Does every machine have actual remote console? (and I mean console as in, I can sit there and watch the POST console). Do you have build servers and good backups, and tested procedures to do restores if a system needs a total rebuild on the spot?

My group is constantly compared in terms of group size to number of machines. Its maddening since we support 5 different flavors of unix (and VMS), some with ok tools configured and ready, some nearly "hand crafted". Then at least 3 different versions of each of those flavors. We can't seem to get projects approved to fix any of this (and god forbid we did it without a project!)

We are compared against a Windows group, that supports a couple of flavors of Windows, and has had automation tools to schedule and do work remotely setup for years. Of course they can admin more systems with less headcount... they have the tools and environment setup to do it!

Hell it took us almost 2 years to get project approval to set the machines for centralized auth through LDAP... and they wonder why we seem to need so many people for so few machines.

So frankly, I don't think the question has enough information to be answered usefully. There are just too many variables to be able to put up a good estimation of appropriate head count per machine. I can tell you though that standardization, automation, and redundant designs will decrease that head count.

As will properly trained/experienced admins (if we could only get them to send a couple of people to basic sun training we would be way better off... but we can't even get that. We have guys that have been effectively working on the level of entry level admins for years, who have never been able to get management to send them to a class).

-Steve
(who should post anonymously but, on some level hopes they will read this...)

Re:Over 9000

[Random BedHead Ed]

Hokey work ethics and obsolete tools are no match for a good Linux LiveCD at your side, kid. I've worked from one side of this industry to the other. I've seen a lot of strange stuff, but I've never seen anything to make me believe your all-powerful "instinct" can control your destiny.

Depends

[slimjim8094]

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.

If you have a fully managed office, and you can remote in to all these desktops and fix everything really quickly - then you're probably OK.

Like most of IT, whatever works.

Re:Depends

[RobertM1968]

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.

If you have a fully managed office, and you can remote in to all these desktops and fix everything really quickly - then you're probably OK.

Like most of IT, whatever works.

That last sentence hits the head right on the nail...

The numbers really are determined by a lot of factors... if your business revolves around programming and engineering, and thus your workers are from those fields (as opposed to tons of avg computer users in a non computer/technical field), you are less likely to have serious issues that IT needs to address, thus requiring a smaller IT staff. And of course, what money IT is allowed to spend on initial setup and/or maintenance also determines the staffing size for IT. One can design a system that remote boots from the NIC and reinstalls everything to a machine specific image - or kicks the boot to the HDD if there are no problems making serious non-hardware issues trivial - if the money was there during the initial setup or a big upgrade phase... or one can fix the stuff the old fashioned way and go hands on (which requires more of an IT staff). Hardware differences also can determine staffing size. One of our customers had a problem with certain AMD XP machines when SP3 came out - required lotsa "hands on" fixing... other of our clients did not have those machines and needed no one and no help. Also, are the machines needed 24/7? Is there mission critical data on them (or no mission critical data anywhere - or mission critical data is on the server)?

And so on... inotherwords, there are a ton of factors that determine staffing needs for IT. It could be one person per 10 or one person per 100, etc.

Thus, slimjim8094's statement really does sum it up nicely...

Like most of IT, whatever works.

Re:Depends

[Junior J. Junior III]

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^H^H^H^H^H^H the right people.

A good SA can come in and make a lot of these stupid little problems go away, never to return.

These sorts of problems can also be caused by bad management exerting too much control over the admins, or admins with weak people skills trying to please everyone rather than prioritize and do the right thing.

When asked to do something, to you just go ahead and do it? Or do you require things like justifications, business cases, funding, staff, etc? If management can just ask anything of the IT staff, they will do so, and it will feel like you're being walked all over, and that you're overworked. If you have some basic sanity checks and make those requirements before a project can be greenlighted, you'll find that your job can be a lot easier. Doing this also makes planning happen before you get midway through a project and find that different stakeholders have different opinions on what should be done next.

100 to 1 is about right

[alen]

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

Support/user ratio

[SoundGuyNoise]

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.

Re:Support/user ratio

[StrategicIrony]

I've run about 700:1 ratio before. Of course, we were 2400 staff and 4 techs. It wasn't too bad because first thing in the morning, one of the techs would make sure we always had 3-5 good running PCs in spare for each type of image in the building and we solved a lot of problems with "swap the machine". A tech could create 5 images in less than 20 minutes of real "desk time" using my network deployment setup.

When an organization staffs that way, nobody gets to bitch when the answer to most problems is "re-image" because we found out that doing more detailed troubleshooting for anyone under Director level, or one of the few critical technology people simply put us too far in the hole time-wise to get anything else done. It's faster to tell them to copy their data to the network, then go down and make sure they did it right and swap the machine. They can copy the data back after we set up their email. Max time on a support call that way was ~15 minutes and solved ANY problem.

We actually managed to move an entire building of people from one place to the other in our spare time at that position as well as deploying wireless and doing about a dozen other things. It wasn't a sweatshop - it was actually one of the nicer places to work I've been to.

We were running a wide variety of apps, which we solved by having 3 standard images that provided a substantial coverage of everything. Once the image was built, there was never any reason to install "apps" because they were on the image. There were two or three that weren't included that had strict controls on who could use them, but they were 1-2 minutes to install.

if you can standardize the hardware and application images, this 680:1 isn't insane at all.

Re:Proper Planning

[ColdWetDog]

Admins? Admins?

Why, in my day we didn't have Admins.

We had to unbox the machines ourselves, plug EVERYTHING in. We even had to figure out interrupts by ourselves. And don't get me started about trying to snake the coax around the building.

Kids these days. Spoiled rotten. Don't even have to get up to turn the record over.

Grump.

Too many chiefs and no indians

[grapeape]

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.

Re:Too many chiefs and no indians

[Penguinisto]

* Remote desktop and VPN are your best friends. Learn them, live them, love them.

* No need to forget the former client. Instead, tell them that your consulting rates are $150/hr at a 10 hour minimum fee per incident, with a 150% premium on weekends and holidays. That usually shuts them up in very short order. If you actually prefer to get some scratch/business off of them, drop the 10-hour minimum to 2 or 3, and only budge on the rates if you know that the going rates locally are lower.

* Your employer had better be paying for gas and travel time, plus wear+tear on your vehicle (if they haven't already supplied you with one of their own), and don't forget the tax write-off on the car if you're using yours.

What are you really asking?

[jimbobborg]

I've seen one sysadmin per 70 Unix servers and one sysadmin per 30 Windows servers. That's a general guideline for SERVER systems. Desktops are another matter. I've yet to see a serious roll out of Unix desktops, so I'm going by Windows systems, but one help desk tech per 50 systems is what I've personally seen as optimal. More Windows PCs per tech and the help desk gets overwhelmed. Less than that and they sit around and play games most of the day. This is assuming that you push updates over the network, not go around and manually update each PC.

I think you're understaffed.

[Anonymous Coward]

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

150: 1 is Decent..

[ironwill96]

You have more than double that so i'd say you are pretty understaffed. I saw a video once that was actually pretty intelligent in talking about standard support ratios. Basically, there isn't a "standard" the answer is almost always "it depends". You start with your userbase - how tech savvy are they? How many applications are you supporting? What kind of hardware do you have? How many remote supporting tools do you have to use? Each of these answers adjusts the support ratio up and down and sometimes something as low as 75:1 is needed and other times 300:1 is just fine.

Still, in the place I work now we have 600 machines and 40 servers or so (most virtualized) and we have 13 IT people (with 1 open position right now). This includes 1 helpdesk person, 2 programmers, 2 systems support personnel (they support specific software we use), 2 hardware techs, 2 network analysts, 3 systems engineers, a secretary, and the boss.

Re:Proper Planning

[mirkob]

If a dept feels they're understaffed, they must first evaluate the workload and determine if the implementation is unnecessarily causing extra work . Then correct the root issues (possibly hiring contractors for the interim) and reevaluate.

unfortunately the core problem is the fucking stupid users, no way to smat them up, nor to sack them...

the second problem is the presence of more than 100 different programs, about 2 to 15 are to install in every single station in seemly random assortment that vary wildly depending on the single user...
no way to solve that either.

the third is a continuous spawning of new programs or functionality to implement the week before, so that you hastily put something up, than have to spend 5 time that time to correct, expand, modify, document ecc...
all between a problem and an emergency

without those 3 problem there would be less than 1/5 of the problem... end personal needed.

now there is 4.5 tecnician, and 2.5 administrative to manage about 50-60 servers (half linux half win) and about 500 users on windows pc

Re:Proper Planning

[Abstrackt]

Sheesh, I remember token ring. Slickest thing since sliced bread.

Till the token fell out anyway. Then you had to send some noob PFY out to search for it under the desks. Hours of entertainment with that one.

Re:Facebook: 1 engineer per million users

[Capt James McCarthy]

Jeff Rothschild, the vice president of technology at Facebook, said in a recent presentation that Facebook has 230 engineers supporting data for more than 300 million users. He says Facebook seeks to maintain a ratio of one engineer for 1 million or more users. Facebook is vague about exactly how many servers it has, saying it's "more than 30,000." But at 30,000 servers and 230 engineers, that's a ratio of about 130 servers per admin.

Microsoft says it has automated its data center operations to the point where its admins can each manage between 1,000 and 2,000 servers. That matters, as the company may pack more than 300,000 servers into its new container data center in Chicago. It expects to support that facility with about 30 employees, including admins and facility maintenance staff.

"Number of servers per admin" is to limited to be properly measured, even in your examples. Can one admin manage 5000 *nix boxes that are all identical, running a clustered web server? Sure. Given the proper engineering and tools, it's very possible. Now throw in a bunch of other applications that users request or a business requires and now you will need more staff. Also, supporting a bunch of pizza boxes or supporting one piece of heavy iron can make a difference is trying to measure this number. I know of a couple of folks who admin one box. Granted, they are either a large SUN and IBM hardware, running databases, web servers, and numerous applications, but look at their job requirement in a slanted way and it would look as though they are responsible for only one system. While another admin can have a couple of thousand desktops all identical and simple. And their value would still be relative to whomever the users are.

Re:Proper Planning

[benjamindees]

This is exactly the way to think about IT. End-users are not your "customers" or "clients", and your role is not to serve them. They are your competitors. Your job is to eliminate them, and to replace them with whirring, glowing rooms filled with triple-redundant servers flawlessly executing fully-normalized databases and millions of tiny shell scripts.

Middle managers are your natural enemies. Their interests are to increase warm bodies and to monitor butt-in-seat time. Treat them with cautious scorn.

Your major challenge is to quantify your work as it relates to deferred costs and increased productivity, and to demonstrate this benefit to executive management. This will require a quick typing finger, elite charting skills, and a deft touch on the laser pointer.

By the way, how many middle managers did you have to kidnap and drug before you were recognized by executive management?

Unix desktops. Oh, the happy memories....

[BenEnglishAtHome]

I've yet to see a serious roll out of Unix desktops...

I have. We had two SAs who handled everything on that rollout. I was one of the two. We installed and maintained all software (that was written and pushed to a central server by a different staff). We installed and maintained all equipment, both field and server room. The standard setup was each group was 10 to 15 people. One secretary used a desktop and everybody else had a laptop. All laptop users got an individual laser printer for home use. Each group had two impact printers for forms and one networked laser. Each group connected to their own database server. There were three additional servers that controlled other functions. Every single machine ran SCO OSR 3-point-something. Hardware was IBM for everything.

Us 2 SAs did everything. It didn't matter how small or large the problem, from replacing a USB-to-ethernet dongle to rebuidling a server (I could fully build a server, pulling spare hardware, imaging from tape, and restoring all databases from online backup in under two hours. We had that shit wired, I tell ya!) to taking calls from people who didn't know how to turn off the reveal codes in WordPerfect, we did it all.

Everything that could be scripted was. Our morning checklists and reports took a half hour, tops. On a good day, that was all we had to do all day. On the worst of days, we might work hard. But bad days were rare. We could take our vacations and know that no matter what shit hit the fan, the one of us who was on-site could handle it. We had the wonderful luxury of being able to walk around the user groups and ask people if they needed anything. They almost never did.

Our total user base was about 300 people. So I'd say if things are designed right, 2 people can handle 300 easily.

Of course, there were 25 or so admins and desktop people on the Windows side of the house, taking care of about 1200 users. They ran around looking like they were doing important stuff all the time. And I guess they were. Their stuff broke so much, they were constantly being rewarded for rescuing some project from the jaws of disaster or fixing some irritating problem that had plagued their users for years. Those poor sods hid in their cubicles most of the time; they didn't dare walk among the user population for fear of someone throwing something at them or, at minimum, being constantly harrassed by users pleading "Could you take a quick look at this?"

Our users just did their jobs, working on hardware and software that just worked, reliable as gravity (well, nearly) with no drama at all.

You can see what's coming, can't you?

The higher-ups started wondering aloud why those two SAs over in the corner never seemed to be running around in a panic fixing things. "Don't they have any work to do?" The higher-up attitude toward the Windows guys was completely different. Hell, I remember one of them getting an award for recovering data from a crashed server. They actually rewarded the guy with a certificate and a little ceremony because he had backups, something we took for granted in our little world.

Obviously, it couldn't last. All our apps got re-written to Windows. All the Unix stuff got ashcanned. Our user population got folded in with everyone else and forced to use the standard Windows-image machines.

And we now run around putting out fires with no time to catch our breath.

Man, those were the days. 1 to 150 was a breeze. Nowadays, deskside support is at about the same ratio and we're always on the verge of burnout, always working harder, always falling a little further behind. As much as I love my work (and I do, dearly, love helping alleviate the pain of a user who can't get their work done until I fix something), I'm *seriously* looking forward to retirement.