Notepad++ is one of the best applications ever made

Kinda new to the whole sysadmin thing, but tmux has been an absolute game changer for me. No more remote desktop for long running processes, I can just do everything from ssh.

Powershell scripts have been my tool of choice for the past few years (stuck in Windows world unfortunately).

Lately I’ve been dipping my toes into automating switch config - Ansible has been fantastic for that.

I’m a big fan of RoyalTS for managing my RDP / SSH access to servers. Keepass for password storage.

I’ve been in the weird space of on-prem “cloud” infrastructure (mostly kubernetes) for the last seven years but I’ve been doing infra, middleware, and devops for more than twenty years and have my own way of working that’s nearly GUI-free.

Tools I use every single day:

• tmux
• The one true editor and org-mode.
• The other one true editor.
• Bash, sed, awk, and the indispensable Shellcheck.
• Munging data with
  • jq and jiq for JSON.
  • yq similar to jq but processes YAML, JSON, XML, and TOML.
  • mlr is like awk, sed, cut, join, and sort all in one for CSV and TSV.
• curl and httpie.
• ag (the Silver Searcher) out of habit but ripgrep is awesome too.

Less often but very useful:

• socat a swiss army knife for sockets.
• ansible
• terraform

Languages, because I write my own tools:

• Go, a lot of it and I still don’t like it.
• Python, and I tolerate it (Perl is still better for getting things done but lost mind share).
• Rust, and I like it.
• Elixir, and I love it.
• Guile and Janet when nobody’s looking and I don’t have to share (though the Nix folks don’t mind me…).

Vscode. Yes it’s managed by Microsoft, and yes it’s a newage emacs (it can do anything with add-ons), but regardless of what your tasks are it’s probably going to be useful.

Pretty minor one, but for Windows, greenshot is a great replacement for Snipping Tool, and includes easy to use highlighting tools for SOP’s, etc.

Big fan of the IODD. I love having a ton of bootable images ready to go on a single drive. I mostly use it to boot disk wiping software, disk imaging software, and malware removal tools but it also serves as my main flash drive with common software and scripts I use a lot.

PDQ! Inventory and Deploy

Along with pre packed PowerShell scripts.

I have a bunch of pages and tasks that can be run from the right click menu in Inventory so not only myself, but also less technical team members can run them.

It also is nice to RDP or VNC into a machine with a keyboard shortcut.

Microsoft’s PowerToys has a lot of cool stuff in it and I use the color picker, awake, and mass rename tools frequently.

Scappman is also very useful if you’re deploying software though Intune and provides automated software updates for a lot of applications.

My company has been moving onto Kubernetes recently and I’ve found Lens to be very helpful with it. It has a nice cluster dashboard and has inbuilt shortcuts to jump onto containers, see logs, etc.

For systems creation, provisioning and config management Hashicorp’s terraform and packer, and RedHat’s ansible are indispensable.

govc for managing guests in vCenter.

jq for parsing json.

I like tmux better than screen, but use both.

Not really a tool, per se, but Netbox is a great DCIM/IPAM application for managing your infrastructure.

Just learned about it and am currently learning, but Apache JMeter looks like a useful tool for running automated load testing against different kinds of services.

as a IT admin and helpdesk guy in a smaller company, I use those Windows tools:

• Greenshot - lightweight screenshot tool with editing
• VsCode (this replaced notepad++ for me)
• Microsoft Stream - making quick, easy guides
• Terminal - part of Win 11, installable for Win 10, is really nice terminal app
• PowerToys - my most used is the quick search bar where I sometimes put temp text or use it as a calculator (or opening apps), Text extraction, Fancy Zones, file preview (ctrl+space)
• Edge vertical tabs - dunno if you would count it as a tool but having vertical tabs with groups is really amazing IMO

Outside of the typical ping, nslookup, curl, etc…

Absolutely huge plug for Devolutions Remote Desktop Manager. Couldn’t iive without it. The rest of their product stack is also top-notch.

Also VSCode with various extensions for scripting. Also ObsidianMD for notes and knowledge.

Terraform and Terragrunt as a combination are really powerful.

Building reusable modules that you string together to infinity with automatically managed strategies is really powerful.