Beyond Scripts: How Far Can Claude Go for Sysadmins?
Posted by N0x_0wl@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 13 comments
I'm the sole system administrator for a B2B tech company of 80+ employees. I'm curious to know if any of you are using Claude (Code or Cowork) apart from basic script and policy generation?
VA_Network_Nerd@reddit
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triplebits@reddit
Beyond one-shot scripts, the more interesting use is giving it read access to your log aggregators and a scheduler. Something that wakes up every few hours, pulls system health metrics and security event summaries, cross-references against a baseline it built last week, and writes a brief digest to a Slack channel or creates a ticket when something drifts. You are not in the loop unless it flags something.
How much of your day is currently reactive versus proactive? That changes whether the ROI makes sense.
post4u@reddit
This goes for Claude or Codex (I personally use Codex).
Built an MCP server for our documentation system, Tettra. Want to document anything? I just tell Codex to do it and it's done. Omg what a time saver. It does a good job too.
We're starting to recreate tools we're paying for and or make them better or more customized for us. Someone mentioned Lansweeper. It uses SQL for reports. I was already a pretty good SQL guy. Now I can write absolutely anything we need. So can my other team members that know nothing about SQL.
Use it to parse logs or compare files or create spreadsheets.
Need anything done converted to "...as code"? Windows installs, firewall configs, automations. Easy now.
There are MCPs for all kinds of stuff now. Azure, Google, SQL, Github, Docker, Kubernetes. Connect and open a whole world.
stoopwafflestomper@reddit
I was on board until the sql part.
post4u@reddit
These newer models are great at writing and optimizing SQL code. Microsoft has an official MCP for SQL server. We do a lot of Oracle coding too. Have been using Codex to write queries. Haven't tried their MCP yet. Their official version only appears to work with their AI version, Oracle AI Database. Been waiting to see if they or some 3rd party releases one for their regular database platform.
SalamanderIcy356@reddit
I used Claude Opus 4.6 to vibe code a web application for performing Fortimanager lookups.
I’m the network admin at my workplace, and in 90% of all firewall opening tickets, users have no concept of source, destination and port concepts. It’s often just “this server isn’t responding” (no details).
So I got fed up, and did the following: - created a read only API user on Fortimanager for policy lookups only - threw the API key in a Github repo secret - threw in a Jira API ticket - asked Claude to create an entire application with UI, backend and everything - tested and fine tuned locally as a container with localhost (with API keys in the OS keychain) - deployed on a LAN kubernetes cluster
Now users can perform lookups across all our sites with this tool on IP/FQDN and port, and create a preformatted Jira ticket automatically with a button click if the connection is DENIED (if it’s ALLOWED, theres a brief tooltip explaining how eg. the server firewall and port listening should be checked - not a Fortigate ticket).
I focused hard on getting Claude to make it as intuitive and user friendly as possible, but honestly - it pretty much did that out of the box.
It’s insane how efficient it is. I didn’t write a single line of code myself. It’s saving me so much time when users can troubleshoot their connections themselves and the tickets are preformatted with all the relevant information for me to solve them super quickly.
I’m happy, the users are happy, boss is happy, Anthropic is happy (since I went way past budget on tokens, lol).
Vegetable-Ad-1817@reddit
You’re talking to Claude right now or maybe you are Claude? Who can tell.
Wise_Guitar2059@reddit
Not as good as it is for coding.
Sandfish0783@reddit
I use it to review logs. Dropping an SOSReport or a Windows EVT log set into VSCode and letting Claude run an analysis can save some time. Still verify the findings but it can highlight the details pretty quick then I can confirm timestamps and sources.
mixduptransistor@reddit
I'm finding it helpful as a search engine and a way to coalesce research across domains or products, I find it invaluable when it comes to bashing up some scripts. At home I'm 'vibe coding' a project app that I've had in my head mostly as a way to see how that works and what it's capable of. While doing that, it's doing deployments to Azure and is kind of impressive when it needs to troubleshoot something but it also gets off the rails so I'm still very far from feeling comfortable giving it access to actually change systems, prod or not
buy_chocolate_bars@reddit
I'm halfway through building a replacement for the functions I use in Lansweeper, that'll save us 4K/year.
I'm almost done with a custom PAM product (ofc with opensource components mashed together) that would otherwise cost us 15K/year.
I'm building another budgeting tool that'll save nothing but time for my director to deal with spreadsheets that never really work. I guess time is money.
None of these need to compete with commercial products, just custom tools.
I'm curious why you are specifically asking about claude? There's like 7-8 different comparable models.
graph_worlok@reddit
There’s an MCP server for Netbox…
Significant_Pen3315@reddit
I've always found gemini pro better than claude