Your first lesson takes about 12 minutes

Sharpen your sysadmin skills on lunch breaks, not weekends

Short, hands-on lessons you run in the browser. Pick a track, learn a thing you can use the same afternoon, move on. Nothing to set up. No month-long slog.

Start free 14-day trial Read a graduate story

No card for the trial. Cancel in two clicks, keep whatever you finished.

your learning board

Automation Essentials

7 / 9 done

12m

avg lesson

3

active tracks

24

labs cleared

Next up: Idempotent playbooks

lab + 2 checks

12 min

median lesson length

2018

the year we started

6,200+

admins learning here

4.8/5

avg lesson rating

What you learn

Four skill areas. Learn them in any order.

Each pillar is a set of short lessons with a lab at the end. Nothing locked behind a prerequisite maze — jump to whatever's biting you this week.

Automation & Scripting

Write small scripts that don't fall apart later. You'll cover reusable patterns, config management done calmly, and playbooks that still make sense six months on.

Access & Hardening

The unglamorous work that saves your weekend.

  • · Running a clean access review without a spreadsheet nightmare
  • · Least-privilege, explained like a human would
  • · Spotting the forgotten accounts nobody closed

Incident & On-Call

Tabletop drills based on real outages, scrubbed of names. You'll practice running the call, escalating cleanly, and writing a retro people actually read.

Observability & Metrics

Know when something's wrong before a user tells you. Dashboards that mean something, alerts that don't cry wolf, and logs you can actually search.

Straight talk: we don't do single-vendor exam cramming. If a product certificate is your only goal, another provider will serve you better.

60-second skill check

Where should you start?

Answer four quick questions. We'll suggest a pillar — no email required.

Question 1 of 4 25%

What eats most of your week right now?

Rough math

How much time could a few skills buy back?

Drag the sliders. It's an estimate, not a promise — but it's a useful one.

Assumes training trims roughly a quarter of repeat work once it sticks. Your mileage will vary.

Estimated hours reclaimed

~12

team hours per week

That's about

624 hrs/year

Start free trial
Inside a lesson

See the shape of it before you commit

Every lesson follows the same rhythm: a short read, a thing to try, a check to prove it stuck.

01 · read

A 4-minute read

Plain explanation of one idea — say, why idempotency matters when a playbook reruns. No wall of theory.

02 · lab

A browser lab

A sandboxed environment loads in your browser. You make the change, break it, fix it. Nothing to set up on your machine.

03 · check

Two quick checks

Short questions that catch whether it actually landed. Miss one and the lesson points you back to the exact spot.

Graduate story

From "always firefighting" to a quieter on-call rotation

Reza joined after a rough quarter — three major incidents, a team of four, and a backlog that never shrank. He picked the Incident pillar first, then Automation.

Twelve weeks later his team had runbooks for the top five recurring issues and an alert setup that stopped paging people at 2am for non-events. Pages dropped by a bit more than half. Not magic — just the boring stuff done once, properly.

"The browser labs were the thing. I could try something on my lunch break without touching production. That lowered the stakes enough that I actually did it."
Reza Haddad · Lead System Administrator, Tidewater Freight Systems
Before you start

Questions people actually ask

What happens when the free trial ends?+

Nothing automatic. We don't ask for a card up front, so the trial just stops — you won't get charged by surprise. If you want to continue, you pick a plan then. Anything you finished stays in your account.

Do I need to set anything up on my computer?+

No. The labs run in your browser in a sandboxed environment. You sign in and start. That's deliberate — half the reason people quit training is the setup friction.

How long are the lessons, honestly?+

Median is 12 minutes. A few labs run longer — the incident tabletops can hit 40. We label the time on each one so nothing ambushes you.

Can my employer pay for a team?+

Yes. Team plans include a shared progress view for managers and consolidated billing. Start a trial first, loop in your manager, and we'll sort the paperwork. Itemized invoices for professional-development budgets are standard.

Is this right for a total beginner?+

Mostly no. It assumes you already administer systems day to day. A brand-new beginner can follow along, but they'll find some lessons move fast.

Start your free 14-day trial

Create a login and you're in — full access to every pillar for two weeks. No card, no call, no pressure.

  • Every lesson and lab, unlocked
  • Progress saved if you upgrade later
  • Cancel in two clicks, anytime

(512) 663-0471 · team@lumenswitch.io

612 Brazos Street, Floor 4, Austin, TX 78701