The lives of SysAdmins and IT teams are frustrating and complicated enough. You don’t need the lack of practical tools (if you can even find any available for what you need) for managing and retrieving information, networking, monitoring and the dozens of other tasks and responsibilities filling your plate on a day-to-day basis. You also don’t need to shell out hundreds or even thousands of dollars on tools, utilities, and programs to ease the demands of your job.
Since we know how over-flowing your plate already is, we’ve put together a list of the best free tools for SysAdmins, ranging from diagnostics and analytics to troubleshooting, monitoring and maintenance. These 48 tools are must-haves for the SysAdmin toolkit, whether for occasional or daily use.
We have scoured hundreds of SysAdmin tools and desktop support tools and then selected these 48 based on their ease of use, security, portability, and compatibility with servers and operating systems. Whether you need to diagnose and solve a problem or analyze a directory or a handle, the following list of free tools for SysAdmins and desktop support professionals should help alleviate some of your administrator stress. Please note: The following best tools for SysAdmins are not ranked in order of quality or importance. The numerical listing is provided for point of reference only.
As a system administrator, you are responsible to make sure everything in your network is up and running. That means that running commands on the terminal is just not enough and changing configuration files or making small scripts to do certain tasks are also an important part of the job. In such a situation, you must have a text editor that you are very comfortable with and lets you get things done quickly and efficiently. Here is a roundup of the text editors that are the most popular.