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.

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

[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.

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.

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

[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?