Administering Ill Behaved Applications

Not everyone is WritingApplicationsThatRunWell, so if your job is MakingApplicationsAdministratable, you may need to use some tricks and tools of the trade to avoid annoying 3:00 AM panic calls.

Pro-active monitoring: It's better to fix a problem before it happens than react to it after it does real damage. Watch for things like disk space getting low >instead< of waiting until "out of disk space" messages crash your apps.
Automate monitoring tasks: Have the system notify you when things are going bad, rather than having to devote your time to tracking it. Computers have more patience and free time than you.