Whats in your toolkit?

What are some tools in your bag of tricks?

     In the 2000-2010 years I was lucky to have lead many projects to merge IT teams due to corporate M&A. Each one unique to what needed to be done and the people I had the privledge to work with. One of the first things we always did do was to compare our toolkits. 3rd party products which helped us work magic at low costs.

Below are a few examples:

• PAL - Performance Analyzer of Logs
• Perfmon is a great tool but not many sysadmins use it to troubleshoot as results are hard to interpret or due to uncertainty in what counters to select
• PAL gives you pre-built templates to load into perfmon and then, the greatest feature of all.... import the trace output logs & PAL analyzes it and presents the results in an informative report
• Great for analyzing Exchange, AD, IIS, and Sharepoint servers
• Knoppix
• A bootable CD or USB drive with free emergency data and system recovery tools
• An ERD (emergency recovery disk) is critical for any support person.
• Reset the local admin password
• Recover data from a failed Windows sytem
• Repartition the hard drive or extend volumes
• Network analysis and administration tools
• ERD Commander is another nice alternative
• Dameware mini-remote
• A nice utility that allows you to take control of a users PC so you can fix their problem without leaving your desk.
• Handy if you dont have a corporate remote administration package
• Hyena
• An administration tool which can connect to multiple domains.
• Useful in exporting AD objects and their properties.
• Searches are often easier than using AD users and computers to display custom AD attributes for multiple objects at the same time. If your not good at LDAP querries, this makes it simple.
• Ability to edit multiple objects at the same time
• Ghost
• Utility that is very common. Many times where a hard drive is failing and wont stay online long enough for Windows to let you copy everything off, Ghost may be able to help. Put the drive into an external USB drive enclosure & you can grab a image of it to recover someones data.
• Powershell Plus by Idera
• If you dont know powershell yet, you will need to learn a little which this tool can help.
• Powershell Plus has a large library of scripts built-in to instantly help even PS veteran that includes scripts for AD, Exchange, SQL & Sharepoint
• Idera has many other useful tools for SQL and Sharepoint
• RedGate SQL Toolbelt
• Fantastic backup with compression tool
• Monitoring and SQL admin tools (too many to list)
• Veeam One, Veeam backup
• Comes in a free version so if your budget is tight, it can help you greatly with your virtual environment to montior and backup.
• The full licensed versions win awards year after year at VMWorld
• Training videos are provided on the Veeam website
• NetIQ Domain Migration Suite
• This product may have been discontinued but it was the best utility I found for migrating users, groups, computers and email.

So.. what do you have in your own bag of tricks?