The 10 commands that cover 90% of your admin day

Most admin work is the same ten commands every time.

When something feels off, most engineers bounce between a dozen tools. Half of them are never needed. The signal is always in the same ten places.

Load and uptime, disk, RAM, open ports, top CPU processes, who is logged in, recent logins, recent log lines, current identity, kernel version.

uptime                              # load average and system age
df -h /                             # root disk
free -h                             # RAM and swap
ss -tlnp                            # open TCP ports and the processes behind them
ps aux --sort=-%cpu | head -6       # top six processes by CPU
who                                 # active sessions
last -3                             # three most recent logins
journalctl -n 5 --no-pager         # five most recent log entries
id                                  # current user and groups
uname -r                            # running kernel

These ten commands give you load, disk, memory, ports, processes, sessions, logins, logs, identity, and kernel. Most incidents are visible from here.

Bookmark the list or run it as a one-liner on the next box you log into.