The situation in IT is very different. As someone who has been both developer and product manager, I know how difficult and time consuming it is to have one person to solve a problem that another person is facing. Not to mention the high failure rate. The reason is the difficulty of one person (the admin) giving another person (the developer) just enough information and expertise to solve the problem in the right way.

Admins encounter a lot of small problems, and when they do there is likely no off-the-shelf software to help, and handing the problem to internal development, or outsourcing it is expensive for the reasons noted above. We’ve found with our PowerShell offering particularly that admins find huge value in the fact that they can be more self-sufficient. The interface is easy and powerful enough that they can solve the problem themselves rather than going through these challenges.

You raise a deeper question of whether this is a “good thing”. I view programming as a form of communication, it’s communication between man and machine. It takes many years for people to learn to communicate with each other, but if you don’t do it you end up functionally illiterate and basically useless to society. As computers continue to dominate more of our lives I feel that those who cannot “communicate” with computers are trending more and more toward functionally illiterate. So until computers can communicate with us in our natural languages, learning to “communicate” in some sort of machine language is time well spent.

Also, I am not saying that you must or should use the CLI everytime; IF there is a tool that does the job and can be leveraged, well – that’s fine for me of course! But sometimes there is no such a tool, or often it is too big, or too expensive… or it is not exactly what you need… or maybe, as Jim says in one of the comments, maybe you also need to learn and customize the tool…

In a number of cases, being able to “roll your own” is invaluable, IMHO.

Answer to Aszurom: have you tried LOGPARSER?

I’ve studied physics and so I know that the situation is comparable. Those guys had to code a lot in former times but now it is not necessary anymore because most of the programs they need are already available. Re-inventing the wheel is never cost-effective. It is just a waste of time. This applies to all disciplines.

Don’t you think that argument is a bit like saying that a long haul trucker shouldn’t bother learning to change a tire or check his oil because physical science students don’t need to.

Just because there’s a GUI tool to do something doesn’t mean that doing it by hand in a GUI tool every time is a better idea than writing a script you can reuse each time. Next you’ll be telling us that we shouldn’t do unattended software installs because filling out an answers file requires special skills that are a “waste of time” to learn.

Case in point… I have a big series of log files that no off-the-shelf tool is going to parse for me. All I want to do is extract IP addresses and timestamps and export those into a .csv that I can then play with in Excel to spot trends. If I were half as familiar with Powershell as I was once with Basica.exe and Turbo Pascal, it would be a done deal in 5 minutes. As it is, I go without that info.

My point rather is that there are very sophisticated management suites that solve all kinds of automation problems. That is, once you filled your toolbox with the GUI tools that fit to your environment, there will be no additional tweaking or learning. However, if you have to write a new script every time you come across an automation problem, it will cost your company more than just the $150 because it will sum up over time. I think we agree that a script that you hacked together in two hours only solves a very specific problem. But a $30.000 management suite can do little more than your tiny script. And don’t say that your company only paid once for the script but you can use it forever. You have to adapt the script every time your environment changes which costs additional money. You also forgot to mention that it costs you a considerable amount of time to keep yourself up-to-date with the latest scripting technology which probably is the biggest cost factor for your company.

Only since I started blogging I realized how many great admin tools are out there, some are free and some cost money. I found that most of them are worth their money. Otherwise these companies wouldn’t survive. Do-it-yourself is fun – yes – but only in rare cases cost-effective. Another word for this development is “industrialization”. It appears that IT management is now mature enough to become industrialized. However, I agree that there are still many networks in the wild that are not standardized enough to be ready for this step. Thus for many admins scripting is still a part of their daily work.

I’ve been a systems administrator for 20 years on too many platforms to keep track of, and on each platform I honed my scripting skills to the point that I could build a safe and robust script to accomplish the specified task without excessive time being required.

When you talk about downloading a tool being more cost effective than scripting, you must be talking about very small environments. For example, my time costs the company about $75/hr. If I take a couple of hours to script a tool, that’s $150. If I can buy a tool for $50 that does the same thing but has to be licensed on 650 systems, that sets the company back $32,500. Which do you think would be an easier sell?

Yes, there are times with a comprehensive tool can be downloaded, but to make a generic statement that it’s not efficient for system admins to code or script (there is a difference), is not accurate. Even if you can download a free tool that seems like it does what you are looking for, there are invariably tweaks that have to be done to fit your environment so you still have to have the skills to modify the tool somehow.