1.4. Know Your Resources

System administration is mostly a matter of balancing available resources against the people and programs that use those resources. Therefore, your career as a system administrator will be a short and stress-filled one unless you fully understand the resources you have at your disposal.

Some of the resources are ones that seem pretty obvious:

But some may not be so obvious:

It is important to note is that it is highly valuable to take a complete inventory of those resources available to you and to keep it current -- a lack of "situational awareness" when it comes to available resources can often be worse than no awareness at all.