Smart hands explained
What remote hands and smart hands services cover, how requests are scoped and billed, and how to work on equipment you do not own.
Smart hands is the service where a colocation provider's technicians act on a customer's equipment on their behalf. The customer's engineer might be in another country; you are the person standing in front of the rack.
Remote hands versus smart hands
Providers draw the line differently, but the common split is this: remote hands covers simple, prescribed tasks — reseat a cable, power cycle a device, read a display, check an LED. Smart hands covers work that needs judgement or configuration — installing hardware, troubleshooting under direction, media swaps, testing circuits. Remote hands is often included; smart hands is usually billed in blocks of time.
How a request should be scoped
- Exact location: site, cage, rack, and U position.
- Exact device: hostname, serial or asset tag — never "the top one".
- The specific action, in order, with the expected result after each step.
- What to do if the expected result does not occur.
- Who to contact live during the work, and how.
Working well under someone else's direction
The skill is narration. Describe what you see before you act, confirm each step out loud, and read back exactly what changed. The remote engineer cannot see the amber light you are looking at, so your description is their only instrumentation. Vague reporting — "it looks fine" — wastes the window; specific reporting — "port 12 link LED is off, port 11 is solid green" — resolves it.
Closing the ticket
Record what was requested, what you did, timestamps, the result, and anything you observed but did not touch. On billed work, that record is the invoice justification. On every kind of work, it is what the next technician reads at 03:00.