Sysadmin Training & Development
Small-group, hands-on training that takes sysadmins from ticket-takers to infrastructure leaders — built by people who've been in the trenches, not just the classroom.
$ assess --current-skills
✓ Linux fundamentals: solid
✓ Networking: intermediate
☉ Automation: needs work
$ enroll --track infrastructure-lead
Cohort #27 confirmed. 12 seats left.
$ progress --months 8
Role: Senior Systems Engineer ✓
243
Sysadmins trained
Since 2017
Founded in Denver
4.7 / 5
Avg participant rating
91%
Report career growth within 8 months
Tool Comparison
Two categories of tools that every sysadmin reaches for — and they solve completely different problems. Here's how they stack up.
These utilities read S.M.A.R.T. data from your HDDs, SSDs, and NVMe drives. Temperature, reallocated sectors, power-on hours, wear indicators — all surfaced in a dashboard so you spot failing hardware before data loss happens. Think of them as your early-warning system for storage.
Tools like CrystalDiskInfo fall squarely in this category. Free, open-source (MIT license), Windows-only, and dead simple: launch it, check the health status color. Good, Caution, or Bad. That's the workflow.
All-in-one terminals that bundle SSH, RDP, VNC, SFTP, an X11 server, and built-in Unix commands into a single portable Windows executable. The value? You stop juggling PuTTY plus WinSCP plus Xming plus a dozen other apps — and just open one window.
MobaXterm is the name most sysadmins mention here. Free Home Edition for personal use, paid Professional for teams. Tabbed sessions, a built-in SFTP browser that pops up on every SSH connection, and an X server that handles graphical Linux apps over the network. Not bad for a single .exe.
| Criteria | Disk Health Monitors | Remote Terminal Toolkits |
|---|---|---|
| Primary purpose | Storage health monitoring & failure prediction | Remote server access & session management |
| Category | Hardware diagnostic utility | Network / remote access toolbox |
| Typical cost | Free / open-source | Free (Home) / ~$69/user (Pro) |
| SSH client | No | Yes |
| X11 server | No | Yes |
| S.M.A.R.T. data | Yes | No |
| Temperature alerts | Yes | No |
| File transfer (SFTP/SCP) | No | Yes |
| Portable mode | Yes | Yes |
| Built-in Unix commands | No | Yes |
| Best for | Technicians, help desk, hardware audits | Sysadmins, DevOps, daily server work |
Bottom line: these aren't competing tools. Most sysadmins run both — one watches the hardware, the other connects you to everything else.
Essential Software
Beyond disk monitors and terminal clients, here's what a well-stocked sysadmin workstation looks like. We cover all of these in our training programs.
Automation
Agentless configuration management. Write YAML playbooks, push changes to hundreds of servers. No daemon required on the target — just SSH.
Automation
Infrastructure-as-Code for cloud resources. Declarative configs, plan before apply, state tracking. Works across every major cloud provider.
Monitoring
Prometheus scrapes metrics; Grafana turns them into dashboards. The open-source monitoring stack most teams start with. Free, battle-tested.
Monitoring
Enterprise-grade monitoring for servers, switches, and services. Alerting, historical data, capacity planning. Heavier to set up, but deep visibility once running.
Security
Packet-level network analysis. Capture traffic, filter protocols, trace connection problems. When you need to know what's actually on the wire.
Backup & Recovery
Veeam handles enterprise VM backup and instant recovery. Clonezilla is the free option for disk imaging and bare-metal provisioning. Different budgets, same critical need.
Networking
Network scanner for host discovery, port scanning, service detection, and security audits. If you manage a network and haven't used Nmap — you will.
Scripting
Cross-platform task automation from the command line. Essential for anything touching the Windows ecosystem — and increasingly useful on Linux too.
Diagnostics
40+ deep-dive Windows utilities. Process Explorer, Autoruns, TCPView — the tools you reach for when Task Manager isn't enough. Free from the vendor.
Virtualization
Hypervisors for running multiple VMs on physical hosts. vSphere dominates enterprise. Proxmox is the open-source option that's been gaining ground fast.
Containers
Docker packages apps into containers. Kubernetes orchestrates them at scale. If your team isn't using these yet, it's on the roadmap.
Security
Password management. KeePass is offline and open-source. Bitwarden adds cloud sync with end-to-end encryption. Pick whichever fits your paranoia level.
Professional Development
Whether you're just starting out or pushing into senior roles, these are the certifications and training paths that actually move the needle. We help our students prepare for all of them.
CompTIA
The entry-level industry standard. Hardware, networking basics, OS troubleshooting. Two exams. If you're starting from zero, start here.
Google · Coursera
Covers troubleshooting, networking, system administration, and security fundamentals. Self-paced, hands-on labs. A good starting point if you want structure without a testing center.
Red Hat · EX200
Hands-on, performance-based exam. File systems, users, SELinux, networking, storage, containers. If you touch Linux professionally, this is the cert to get. No multiple choice — you do the work live.
Microsoft
Identity, governance, storage, compute, virtual networks on Azure. Free training available on Microsoft Learn. Increasingly required for hybrid infrastructure roles.
Amazon Web Services
Deploying, managing, and operating workloads on AWS. Monitoring, data management, security, networking, cost controls. Good if your org is AWS-heavy.
CompTIA
Threats, vulnerabilities, risk management, cryptography, identity management. Required for US government and DoD roles. A strong signal on any sysadmin resume.
Linux Foundation / CNCF
Performance-based exam. Design, deploy, configure, and manage K8s clusters. High demand in DevOps and SRE roles. Avg. salary for CKA holders: $130K-$180K+.
VMware / Broadcom
The certification for managing vSphere environments. Installation, configuration, management, performance tuning. Mandatory training course included — budget accordingly.
What We Do
We start with a skills audit — not a generic questionnaire, but a hands-on evaluation where your team works through real scenarios. From DNS misconfigurations to permission sprawl, we see exactly where the gaps are. Then we map a training plan against your actual infrastructure and business goals, so nothing we teach is theoretical filler.
Hands-on labs. Live environments. Your team builds, breaks, and fixes infrastructure in sandboxed systems that mirror production — because reading about Ansible playbooks isn't the same as debugging one at 2 a.m.
Alert fatigue is real. We train your team to build monitoring that actually matters — dashboards tied to SLOs, escalation paths that don't dead-end, and incident response runbooks they'll use more than once. The result? Fewer 3 a.m. pages, faster mean-time-to-resolution, and sysadmins who trust their tooling instead of fighting it.
For senior sysadmins ready to step into leadership. Architecture decisions, capacity planning, mentoring juniors, cross-team communication — the stuff nobody teaches you until you're already drowning in it.
Results
Promoted in 5 months
“I'd been stuck at the same level for three years. The monitoring and incident response module alone changed how my manager saw me — I went from 'the guy who reboots things' to leading our SRE migration. Not bad for a 10-week program.”
Marcus T.
Systems Engineer, Healthcare IT
40% fewer escalations
“We sent four people through the Build & Deploy track. Within two months, our team was handling things at tier 1 that used to get kicked upstairs. Honestly? Should've done this sooner.”
Diana K.
IT Director, Fintech Startup
$18k salary increase
“The labs are brutal — in a good way. You can't fake it. I came out the other side actually confident in my Linux and networking skills, and it showed in my next interview.”
Rachel M.
Junior Sysadmin → Senior Sysadmin
The Process
Free. Thirty minutes. No pitch deck — just a conversation about your team's current skill gaps, growth targets, and what's actually keeping them up at night. We'll tell you if we're a fit (and if we're not, we'll say so).
We map modules to your stack, your pain points, your timeline. Not a one-size template.
Your team joins a cohort (max 14 participants) and works through hands-on scenarios in sandboxed environments that mirror real production systems. We cap cohorts at 14. That means some sessions fill a month out — so plan ahead.
Post-program skills reassessment, 90-day check-in, and a clear report your leadership can actually use for budget conversations. No vague "learning outcomes." Numbers.
Common Questions
Free Resource
Our free guide maps out the skills, roles, and salary benchmarks from junior sysadmin to VP of Infrastructure — with real data from 243 alumni career paths. Where are you on the ladder? Where do you want to be?
Get Our Free GuideGet Started
Thirty minutes. No slides. Just a direct conversation about your team's skill gaps and how we might help close them. If we're not the right fit, we'll tell you — and point you somewhere that is.
Office
1740 Champa Street, Suite 410
Denver, CO 80202
Phone