[withinboredom]

My experiences for ops is all pre-2012 and with teams numbering less than 3 for the whole org. So I’m sure things have changed or gotten cheaper? I can’t see a team of 3-4 having the budget to get something that allows them to be “lazy”, especially when that budget can go towards something useful. But I guess the pandemic probably changed things there?

[laumars]

Serial connections will only cost you a Raspberry Pi (there's probably some really cheap console servers on eBay too).

I don't think the issue is so much cost but more this kind of systems administration is becoming a forgotten art because 99% of the time modern tooling removes the need for it. So younger sysadmins are never taught how to do these kinds things. However when I started out, I worked in a few small companies that had their physical hosts connected to a console server (which was a Cisco device like a network switch) via serial cables and you'd then connect to that console server remotely.

[topranks]

Depends on the infra and how it’s set up.

If you can afford to have something down for an extended period then fine. But even with a small team some services are built such that certain device outages cannot be tolerated, at least for an extended period.

So out-of-band/console servers or whatever still make a lot of sense and a relatively high priority.