The reason could be the fact that you are asking system administrators to produce them! It is not that they are not capable of producing regular reports. They can and will if given space and time. However the core of their job is dealing with day to day problems and ensuring that the system is running well - now! This means that useful management activities such as reporting get pushed to the background as there is always a short-term crisis or need that must be addressed. System administrators need alerting and monitoring tools to see what is happening on the system currently. Reporting and planning to ensure acceptable future performance is better located with a specific capacity manager, or whoever is responsible for less crisis driven activities such as configuration management. organizational guidelines such as this are available from the UK government in the form of the 'ITIL®' (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) booklets, see www.itil.co.uk, that advise on effective management organization of IT departments. Plenty of case studies are now available to show how this can be done effectively at a reasonable cost. See our case study to see how One2One has gone about implementing performance reporting for a large network of UNIX servers.