In my work I have to use a variety of software programs. It seems that nearly all are down for system maintenance on a regular basis. What exactly is being done in terms of maintaining the systems? How come so much maintenance? Thanks.

There are a lot of things that go on during planned outages.

Often times, they are used for the application of patches and/software upgrades. Manufacturers frequently add new functionality and features, fix errors from prior releases, and patch or address newly-found vulnerabilities. In Q1, 2019, there were more software vulnerabilities found in commercial software products than in any other quarter in history.

Sometimes, these “maintenance windows” are also used to allow internal IT teams to make system changes to fix errors, address problems, improve performance, or add new components/features.

There are many other reasons for downtime, but these are the two big ones in my current world. We try to minimize user downtime by scheduling set windows of low use to do our maintenance and repair work, essentially.

Hope this helps.

Are you saying they're down during normal business hours or just that they always seem to be down for maintenance during normal maintenance windows.

Included in what the Geek says you have to consider the relationship of things being available during the maintenance windows.

Without knowing anything specific, I would be a bit surprised that your business apps are routinely down every maintenance window or down during business hours . If it were me in a role as a leader in your IT organization, I'd be having a chat with my release and change managers.

You are going to need to be a little more specific.
One of the biggest obstacles IT folks face is when the client says something is "broken or doesn't work or it can't" and cannot explain the issue more completely - we then have to read their minds.

Not to mention the never-ending user requests for additional features and functionality. Not that I resent them, that is one of the major reasons I have work to do. However. they don't seem to understand that these requests require work, and for the systems to sometimes be down while being adjusted to their expressed desires.

Yes, security patches and mandatory upgrades are necessary too. If you don't do them in a timely manner, you soon (within months) have a system with at least part of it becoming "unsupported." Wait too long, and your best option is an install from scratch as things have become too out of sync (e.g up-to-date apps running on an old OS) to work well, if at all.

Thank goodness for virtualization, this has made the sysadmin's job much more reasonable by allowing the running of obsolete OSs as guests of your mainstream servers so as to run applications that won't run on current OS's. However, this is not without added complexity, and requires yet another level of involvement and OS instances to manage.

The hackers never sleep. You've got one Mexican fording the Rio Grande while his little brother is searching vendor patches looking for an exploit against your server. Multiply this by tens of thousands and you can see why it is important to stay as safe as you can.

OS patching, application updates, etc. etc. It all depends on what you're talking about.

How would your day go if the system you used broke completely and was down for many hours or many days?

Every time they are doing maintenance from now on - you should feel thankful that they are keeping your system up to date.

User requests, bug fixes, features, Hard/Soft/Firm ware updates, security patches, possibly? What hours do you work? They should be doing them off peak hours, but sometimes you can't for various reasons.

Rusbro

To be more specific, regular maintenance is done in the evening for the most part. I was just curious why it was so frequent.

In my business I deal with whatever software large insurance companies or government contractors chose to use. Some of it is down REGULARLY, so it does affect my day and denies me access to information I need. Again, I think a good part of my frustration is that my point of contact is a 1 800 number where I leave a message. The software is sort of thrown out there and you have to figure it out yourself.

Thanks for providing some insight.

I work in healthcare. We work on the airplane in flight. It's tricky. Once in a while we call downtime on as full system, but usually, we seek to work failovers and keep things humming. It's tough.

Database indexing. We do it almost weekly. Plus the rest.

I worked IT for a bank and a credit union in past lives.
Updates were bad then, I can only imagine now days.
Security, bug fixes, security, user enhancements, security, firmware, security, hardware....
Did I mention security?
Then there is the dreaded hardware crash and/or unexpected issues. I always said it was easier to work on those systems when we WANTED to, rather than when we HAD to...

Also, not trying to ding the OP, but there is a lot of “if I don’t understand it, it must be easy to do” mentality out there also.

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Also, not trying to ding the OP, but there is a lot of “if I don’t understand it, it must be easy to do” mentality out there also

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No I do not think that at all. I work in healthcare and I really did not welcome the tech revolution. When software does not work it costs me money and time. It does not add any value to the nature of my work. I used to be able to dictate work and be done with it. Now it is fill out these forms, checklists etc. and a good part of the time it does not work.

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Originally posted by ZSMICHAEL:
I work in healthcare and I really did not welcome the tech revolution. When software does not work it costs me money and time. It does not add any value to the nature of my work. I used to be able to dictate work and be done with it. Now it is fill out these forms, checklists etc. and a good part of the time it does not work.

I know many healthcare providers who feel the same. I could go in to the other side of the story, but I do that all week, and I'm taking a day off.

Ran across this dialog, seems applicable:

I'll answer the question. You want answers?

I think I'm entitled to it!

You want answers?!

I want the truth!!

You can't handle the truth! Son, we live in a world that has firewalls, and those firewalls have to be managed by men with the root password. Who's gonna do it? You? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for downtime and you curse the SysAdmins. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know: that downtime, while tragic, probably saves systems. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves systems! You don't want the truth, because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that firewall. You need me on that firewall. We use words like "patch", "code", "updates". We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who works and sleeps under the blanket of the very protection that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it! I would rather you just said "thank you", and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a manual, and stand a post. Either way, I don't give a damn what you think you are entitled to!

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I know many healthcare providers who feel the same. I could go in to the other side of the story, but I do that all week, and I'm taking a day off.

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Fair enough.