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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Enterprise Application Support Analyst

💰 $70,000 - $110,000

ITApplication SupportOperations

🎯 Role Definition

The Enterprise Application Support Analyst is responsible for ensuring the stability, availability and performance of mission-critical enterprise applications. This role handles incident triage and resolution, root cause analysis, change and release coordination, integration troubleshooting, user support, and operational process improvements. The ideal candidate combines hands-on technical troubleshooting (SQL, logs, APIs, OS), application configuration knowledge (ERP/CRM/SaaS platforms), and strong stakeholder communication and escalation management skills to meet SLAs and reduce business impact.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Application Support Technician / Help Desk Analyst transitioning to more complex enterprise application responsibilities.
  • Junior Systems Administrator or Integration Specialist with exposure to service desk and production support.
  • Business Systems Analyst or Functional Consultant who has supported enterprise applications in a daily operational capacity.

Advancement To:

  • Senior Enterprise Application Support Analyst
  • Application Support Team Lead / Manager
  • Production Support Manager or IT Service Delivery Manager
  • Integration Architect or Technical Product Owner

Lateral Moves:

  • DevOps Engineer supporting application deployment pipelines.
  • Release / Change Manager coordinating application releases and deployments.
  • Business Systems Analyst or Functional SME for an enterprise application (ERP/CRM/HCM).

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Manage and resolve high-severity production incidents for enterprise applications (ERP/CRM/SaaS), owning the incident lifecycle from detection and triage through resolution, root cause analysis, and communication to business stakeholders to meet SLA targets.
  • Serve as the primary point of contact for on-call rotation, responding to pager/alert notifications, coordinating cross-functional remediation (DBAs, network, development), and performing emergency mitigation steps to restore service availability.
  • Perform detailed root cause analysis (RCA) on recurring incidents and production outages, producing actionable remediation plans, permanent fixes, and risk mitigations to prevent recurrence and reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR).
  • Troubleshoot application issues across the full stack — application logs, middleware, databases (SQL Server, Oracle), integrations, APIs, message queues — to isolate faults, reproduce defects, and guide engineering teams to fixes.
  • Own the end-to-end incident communication process, drafting timely status updates, business impact assessments, and post-incident reports for technical and non-technical stakeholders, leadership, and external vendors.
  • Triage, prioritize, and resolve support tickets within ITSM tools (ServiceNow, Jira Service Desk), ensuring accurate categorization, timely SLAs, and documentation of troubleshooting steps and resolutions in the knowledge base.
  • Coordinate and validate production changes and deployments with Release Management and Development teams, conducting pre-deployment checks, smoke tests, and rollback planning to minimize production risk.
  • Maintain and improve monitoring and alerting (AppDynamics, Dynatrace, Splunk, Nagios) to detect performance degradation or failures proactively and tune alerts to reduce noise while improving time-to-detection.
  • Support integration points and third-party interfaces, managing API calls, message translation issues, SFTP jobs, and middleware configurations; collaborate with integration teams and vendors to resolve cross-system failures.
  • Execute SQL queries, stored procedures, and database diagnostics to validate data integrity, identify data-related failures, and support data restoration or reconciliation efforts during incidents.
  • Troubleshoot authentication, SSO, and identity issues (SAML, OAuth, LDAP, Azure AD) impacting user access and collaborate with IAM teams to remediate configuration or certificate problems.
  • Configure application-level settings and business rules in enterprise platforms (Salesforce, Workday, PeopleSoft, SAP) to support operational needs while following change management and governance processes.
  • Analyze application performance and capacity trends, recommending optimizations, scaling strategies, or configuration changes to improve reliability and user experience.
  • Partner with development teams to escalate reproducible defects, provide detailed logs and reproduction steps, and participate in defect prioritization and verification of fixes in lower environments before production release.
  • Implement and document runbooks, playbooks, standard operating procedures (SOPs), and knowledge articles to standardize troubleshooting and accelerate onboarding of new support staff.
  • Manage relationships with third-party SaaS vendors and integrators for incidents, support escalations, patching schedules, and service level compliance; coordinate vendor-driven fixes and status updates.
  • Lead and participate in operational readiness reviews for major releases, ensuring adequate test coverage, rollback strategies, and post-deployment support staffing are in place.
  • Execute routine operational tasks such as log management, archival, housekeeping jobs, batch/scheduled job monitoring, and verification of nightly processes critical to business operations.
  • Validate and test backup and recovery procedures for critical application components and databases; coordinate and execute restore operations during disaster recovery scenarios.
  • Conduct periodic service reviews and continuous improvement initiatives, analyzing incident trends, SLA performance metrics, and root causes to identify automation, process, or tooling improvements.
  • Enforce and adhere to ITIL-aligned processes including change management, problem management, configuration management, and release management to maintain control and auditability of production systems.
  • Mentor junior support analysts, provide technical guidance, review troubleshooting approaches, and contribute to team training programs to elevate overall support capability.
  • Maintain strong documentation hygiene for application inventories, integration maps, runbooks, and contact rosters to improve response times and reduce organizational risk during incidents.
  • Participate in cross-functional war rooms for major incidents, coordinate actions across multiple teams, and ensure timely resolution with clear ownership and accountability.
  • Ensure compliance with security controls and policies when performing troubleshooting (log access, data handling, privileged operations), escalating security incidents to the security operations center (SOC) when appropriate.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
  • Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
  • Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
  • Assist application owners with feature toggles, configuration changes, and controlled enablement of new capabilities in production environments following change approval.
  • Participate in capacity planning exercises with infrastructure and cloud teams to forecast resources required to sustain application growth and peak usage.
  • Provide input to procurement and vendor management processes for application support tools, monitoring platforms, and third-party services.
  • Help coordinate training sessions and user adoption efforts for new functionality, providing support documentation and follow-up troubleshooting for early adopters.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Incident Management & ITIL processes (incident, change, problem management, SLA enforcement).
  • Ticketing and ITSM tools (ServiceNow, Jira Service Desk, BMC Remedy) — triage, escalation, reporting.
  • SQL and relational database troubleshooting (SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL): writing queries, diagnosing slow queries, verifying data integrity.
  • Application performance monitoring and log analysis (Splunk, ELK/Elastic, AppDynamics, Dynatrace).
  • RESTful APIs, SOAP, web services, and integration troubleshooting (API debugging, Postman, tracing).
  • Operating systems and scripting: Linux (Bash), Windows Server, PowerShell scripting for automation and diagnostics.
  • Cloud platform experience (AWS, Azure, GCP) and cloud-native service troubleshooting (IAM, networking, managed databases).
  • Enterprise application platforms: hands-on familiarity with one or more ERP/CRM/HCM systems (Salesforce, Workday, SAP, Oracle EBS, ServiceNow).
  • Middleware and message queues (Kafka, RabbitMQ, MQ) and ETL/data integration concepts.
  • Version control and CI/CD awareness (Git, Jenkins, Azure DevOps) to understand deployment pipelines and release artifacts.
  • Authentication and identity providers (SAML, OAuth, LDAP, Azure AD) support and troubleshooting.
  • Scripting and automation for runbook execution and repetitive operational tasks (Python, PowerShell, Bash).
  • Backup, recovery, and disaster recovery concepts for applications and databases.
  • Networking fundamentals and diagnostics (DNS, TCP/IP, firewalls, load balancers) as they relate to application connectivity.
  • Security & compliance awareness (data handling, privileged access controls, logging for audits).

Soft Skills

  • Strong written and verbal communication with the ability to explain technical issues clearly to non-technical stakeholders and executives.
  • Customer-focused attitude with patience and professionalism when handling high-pressure incidents and upset stakeholders.
  • Excellent analytical and problem-solving skills, methodical troubleshooting, and attention to detail.
  • Ability to work cross-functionally and influence without direct authority across development, infrastructure, security, and business teams.
  • Prioritization and time-management skills to manage multiple concurrent incidents and requests under SLA constraints.
  • Resilience and adaptability for shift work, on-call rotations, and emergency response scenarios.
  • Coaching and mentoring capability to grow junior team members and improve team processes.
  • Continuous improvement mindset, comfortable driving post-incident action items and operational enhancements.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Associate degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, Engineering, or related field; or equivalent work experience in application support/operations.

Preferred Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software Engineering, or related discipline.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Information Technology
  • Computer Science
  • Software Engineering
  • Management Information Systems
  • Business Administration (with IT specialization)

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 3 to 7 years of progressive experience in application support, production support, or systems operations supporting enterprise applications.

Preferred:

  • 5+ years supporting enterprise ERP/CRM/HCM or large-scale SaaS platforms in a 24x7 production environment with demonstrated incident management, root cause analysis, and change management experience.
  • Experience with ServiceNow/Jira administration, monitoring tools (Splunk/AppDynamics), and cloud platform operational troubleshooting.
  • Hands-on SQL and scripting experience (Python, PowerShell, Bash) and exposure to integration/middleware technologies.
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