Reflection 5 

Merging and Troubleshooting 

The company I am interning with has just acquired National Western Life Group through a merger. This acquisition had been in the works since last year and was a major accomplishment for the company. The acquisition of National Western Life Group was aimed at expanding Prosperity’s offerings in the life and annuity insurance sector. The Information Technology department I am working with was involved in a meeting with the National Western Life Information department to review their system structure and gain access. NWL Information Technology employees were also given guest access to Prosperity systems to ensure a secure integration of NWL’s system. My role was to create accounts for two NWL employees, add them to the correct groups in Azure, image laptops, and ship them to NWL headquarters. 

For the last couple of weeks, most of my tickets have involved onboarding or offboarding employees. Part of onboarding includes setting up equipment with the right access before shipping it. The new equipment process utilizes BigFix, an information technology management system that helps organizations remotely manage and secure computers. I also use this software as an imaging station and to check any device’s operating system across the company. I encountered an issue where the PXE environment, where the image is stored, was not loading despite the health check returning as a pass. Typically, if there is an issue, the health check would show a fail, and I would run a fixlet to solve the problem. That day, the fixlet returned an error code, so I had to remotely access the servers to stop and rerun it. I tried several different approaches to the imaging process, but none worked. Eventually, I started from scratch with a new device that successfully imaged. 

Conclusion 

I have learned that even though I have access to servers and various areas of the system, I sometimes hesitate to configure or delete important settings or files. This week, successfully resolving my ticket by accessing the server, running a script, and restarting one of the servers showed me that I can be more confident in my abilities.