gregwstuart

Cool, now you know. 

No problem kcchevyguy​, thanks for reading!

Yep, all it takes is one time for something to go wrong and you have no documentation for you to realize the importance of documentation. Good points. 

You couldn't be more right! Training is so important, all too often things break and then the company wonders why the staff didn't know what they were doing. Train them first! 

Thanks vinay.by​!

You guys are killing me with the memes! Hilarious.

Good, I'm glad you found something that works for you... that's half the battle!

Ask yourself one question... why is all the important contractual stuff written in a tiny font? Just sayin'!

I haven't had any fail either, however, I haven't had many CIOs wanting to dive in head first either. 

Thanks, I'm glad it helped. 

Thanks for reading smttysmth02gt​, and thanks for the kind words. I expected a lot of comments on documentation, it seems to be the bane of any IT pro's existence. 

Thanks david.botfield​ for reading, yes, trust needs to be earned through verification. 

Yes, standardization is more often than not set aside. It takes real organization to get it right, but it can be done. Agreed on the sandbox for testing, it's almost necessary to have a test environment and with virtualization it has become very easy to set one up. The important this is that your test/dev environment…

rschroeder​ I can't agree with you more, +1 for training your staff. Sometimes companies don't want to invest the time away from the client (if billable work) and the cost of the training class and exam voucher. What happens then is, the employee does it on their own and then leaves to get paid what they should by a…

Generally you see a mixture of SCCM and WSUS, or WSUS and manual patches. It's helpful to have a "patch retrospective" after the completion to gauge what worked and what didn't. Thanks for the reply.

I would disagree with you here, there's always someone on the team that is good with scripting and can jump in and write a good script for what you need. I think documentation is the hardest and the worst! It can be very tedious work, especially where there's lots of IT governance.

Chris, I know what you mean, it is difficult to keep everything the same, but if it can be done, there's definitely value added. Thanks for reading!

rschroeder​ Yep, if AWS has an outage, it's all over the news, thank you Internet! Sounds like you have a blog post to write about the good and bad ISPs, can't wait to read it. 

Yep, going too small or too big will usually hurt the project.

Couldn't have said it better my friend!

Hey, at least you have a test/dev environment to make sure they don't break your production, that's something! Keep plugging away!

Thanks for reading!

Hey, no problem. Glad I could share some useful info. Thanks for reading.

Vendor based tool can be a great addition to SCCM or WSUS. 

You bring up a good point, thanks for reading and taking the time to comment. 

Dashboards can be a good and bad thing... with dashboards, at times, less is actually more. I think everyone would appreciate a "single pane of glass" (the most overused term in IT!) but there are so many metrics you can monitor and once you show your management you can monitor things granularly, then they want to monitor…

Thanks for pointing out the use of Puppet, it definitely makes things easier. 

Couldn't agree more, change controls are very necessary but come become a real burden for administrators. Do you have a lot of change control in place? 

Thanks for reading bobmarley​! Good luck with your tools wishlist!

Thanks for the reply, hopefully some of the links I shared in my post will help you down the right path. I didn't know anything either and, thanks to VMware, was able to try these things out and rebuild the VM as needed.