Tag: sysadmin

At the CTL we have about two dozen utility machines spread over 6 physical locations, as well as another three dozen or so staff laptops. Managing updates, user accounts, and printers for all these machines is not only a big job, but also one of many small repetitive steps—which makes it ripe for automation. Having been exposed to DevOps practices at the CTL, I wanted to find a way to corral all these machines in a sustainable way.

It's extremely helpful to know what's going on with our systems at a glance. One area where we lacked visibility and occasionally ran into conflicts were configuration management runs. We use Salt for our configuration management and orchestration, and here is how we make Salt operations visible to our team in Slack.