Is there anything more fun and rewarding in IT than automation?

blargoe

N2IT wrote: »

@blargoe that is impressive - I hope you nail it. Are you using VB, Powershell or a 3rd party software like Sydi? (Which uses Powershell)

All powershell right now, still working on it though.

SteveLord

I still don't have an automation that takes my lunch order, retrieves it and brings it back to me. Interns are close. But they are protected by laws and junk like that.

the_Grinch

Everyone (the user) helped me automate a task at the MSP I was at. Customer called and wanted to know every service that was being run under a non-standard account on every server they had. This basically amounted to around 30 servers or so. Being the night guy, of course the task came to me. I knew Powershell would have a way to do it, but was lost on the details. Everyone swooped in and showed me what to do. What my company said would probably take a week, the script did in less then 15 minutes. Customer was surprised to say the least when I emailed him the Excel spreadsheet with everything in it. Also, he didn't realize some of the accounts that were running services were people no longer with the company and not disabled.

Second automation I did was at my last job. I got stuck being the web tester for the new student application we released. Basically amounted to filling out name, dob, etc and then submitting it. Major headache that took about 15 minutes per application. We brought some automation software, but it literally worked poorly and didn't support all browsers. Plus it would take a day to build a script for it to follow. Thinking there had to be a better way I did some searching and found Selenium. Within four hours I had a working script that would fill out applications in about 6 minutes. Setup the server and clients, I was filling out 10 applications at a time. The funny thing was we brought in another company that was doing a beta of web testing software and Selenium was the underpinning. They were thrilled with me because I needed little training and wound up fixing several of their bugs as they were issues I ran into.

So I definitely agree, nothing better then automating a task and saving everyone a ton of time.

RouteMyPacket

N2IT wrote: »

I find the biggest thrill in IT is automating something that usually requires hours of effort. The thrill and excitement is priceless not to mention the value add. Sorry just wanted to see what others thought about automating task. It's just so much fun!

Automation is precisley what any experienced System Admin or Network Engineer that have a clue strive for.

Automation = Less Administrative Overhead = A more effective administrator overall

Then again, this is IT and it's hilarious to go into an environment and see all these IT "Pros" and "Experts" that add permissions one account at a time. Change local database passwords on switches/routers one at a time. lol

Or even my personal favorite, log into each switch/router and copy/paste the running config as your backup solution. lulz