How to use scripts in practice in system administration?

Question

Automation

Colleagues, good afternoon!
Faced with professional burnout, I don’t know what to do with myself at work, I can’t find the motivation to learn something new.
I have been working as the only administrator in a small office (60 jobs + 5 remote sites) for 3 years.
The entire infrastructure is on windows, jobs in the domain, everything is set up and does not ask for food. There are no interesting tasks, I do all sorts of nonsense that any Enikey worker can handle (replacing cartridges, minor repairs of office equipment, documentation, helping to press buttons).
Actually, to the essence of the problem - please give real cases of automating some routine office tasks or introducing some useful services.
In the last year I took up Python, but I did not find any useful cases of its use in my work. Tolley I'm doing the wrong thing, I'm learning the wrong thing.

In general, after mastering the most basic technologies to maintain the office's performance - what to do next? what to learn? where to look for motivation? quit and look for work in larger organizations?

Answer 1

Automating the life cycle of objects in parts of the infrastructure (not only AD), creating / deploying / testing the integrity of backups, monitoring, that's all.
In general, in such a situation, it is necessary to engage in self-education sideways or in depth on tasks not related to workers, since there should be enough free time.

Answer 2

If the infrastructure on the wines is Power Shell, and everything that happens around is only through it. An excellent task, for example - delegate the establishment of users in AD and their movement within the organization to the personnel department. Most likely, 1C with a sequel database is used (or other solutions, depending on the solution, the complexity of the implementation may vary). You read the database, say, once every 2-3 hours, determine changes in personnel by key fields, then carry out the appropriate actions in AD. For example, an employee came, saw a new entry in the database, strigerized the institution in AD, sent a letter with credentials to the head of the department where he was accepted, internal instructions to the employee’s personal mail. Transfer to another division - change of the composition of groups and accesses, etc.
Well, look further, if there are moments when you have to do something a couple of times a week - the first step is to automate. The same verification of backups, with reports that everything is OK, or there are problems (something tells me that it is not done in manual mode now, due to boring))).

Answer 3

Go deeper into the clouds, DevOps will come in handy

Answer 4

PowerShell and everything around it - there are many tasks to automate. Also - looking towards cloud services, looking towards Linux along the way - there are many interesting things that can be applied.

Answer 5

If everything is fine with win infrastructure with knowledge, I would look towards Linux and virtualization. It is possible to raise monitoring on Linux for a start, then file sharing for employees. This is from simple. By automation from the latter on posh - writing the user's computer name to the ad account. Collection of file deletion events on the FS in the mysql database. Another interesting task was done - a posh script with a user interface for adding employees to ad groups using the manager's dummy.