Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for IT Operations Analyst

🎯 Role Definition

An IT Operations Analyst is responsible for ensuring the availability, performance, and reliability of an organization’s IT infrastructure and services. The role combines proactive monitoring, incident triage and resolution, automation and process improvement, configuration and change management, and collaboration with engineering, security, and business teams to maintain SLAs and enable continuous service improvement.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Help Desk Technician / IT Support Specialist
System Administrator / Junior Systems Engineer
Network Technician / Infrastructure Support

Advancement To:

Senior IT Operations Analyst / Lead Operations Engineer
IT Operations Manager / Infrastructure Manager
Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) / DevOps Engineer

Lateral Moves:

Cloud Engineer / Cloud Operations
Security Operations Analyst (SecOps)
Release Manager / Service Delivery Manager

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Monitor infrastructure and application health using enterprise monitoring and observability platforms (Datadog, Prometheus, Nagios, Zabbix, Splunk, ELK) to detect, triage, and proactively resolve incidents before they impact users or SLAs.
Lead incident response and remediation by performing rapid triage, root cause analysis, escalation to the appropriate engineering or vendor teams, and coordinating cross-functional communication until restoration of service.
Maintain and operate on-call rotations and incident escalation procedures; prepare and present post-incident reports and actionable remediation plans to prevent recurrence.
Implement, maintain, and optimize automated alerting thresholds, dashboards, and runbooks so that alerts are actionable, prioritized, and aligned with business impact.
Execute change management tasks for OS, firmware, application updates, and infrastructure changes including scheduling, risk assessment, communication, backout plans, and documentation consistent with ITIL best practices.
Perform patch management and lifecycle maintenance across Windows, Linux, and network devices; validate patches in staging, coordinate deployments, and verify successful remediation of vulnerabilities.
Manage backup and disaster recovery processes: verify backups, conduct restore tests, operate recovery procedures, and refine RTO/RPO documentation with the DR planning team.
Administer cloud infrastructure and services (AWS, Azure, GCP) including provisioning, cost monitoring, resource tagging, permissions review (IAM), and troubleshooting platform-specific incidents.
Support virtualization and hyperconverged infrastructure (VMware, Hyper-V, Nutanix): deploy and troubleshoot VMs, manage templates, perform capacity adjustments, and troubleshoot storage/compute issues.
Maintain network fundamentals and troubleshoot connectivity problems at the L2/L3 levels (TCP/IP, DNS, DHCP, routing, firewall rules), partnering with network engineers for complex incidents.
Develop, maintain, and execute Infrastructure-as-Code and configuration automation (Terraform, CloudFormation, Ansible, Puppet, Chef) to reduce manual changes and ensure repeatable deployments.
Create and maintain operational runbooks, standard operating procedures (SOPs), and knowledge base articles to accelerate incident resolution and onboarding.
Automate routine operational tasks using scripting (Python, Bash, PowerShell) to reduce toil and increase operational efficiency; maintain a library of safe, reviewed scripts.
Support CI/CD pipelines and platform reliability for development teams: troubleshoot build and deployment failures, integrate monitoring and alerts for deployments, and collaborate on rollbacks and hotfixes.
Perform capacity planning, trend analysis, and cost optimization for compute, storage, and network resources; provide recommendations and execute right-sizing where appropriate.
Manage vendor relationships and service contracts for cloud providers, hardware vendors, and managed service providers; validate vendor SLAs and coordinate escalations.
Ensure compliance with security policies and regulatory requirements by implementing logging, access controls, encryption, and working with InfoSec for audits and remediation tasks.
Run periodic system health checks, performance tuning, and tuning of databases or middleware components in partnership with DBAs and application owners.
Assist with onboarding, system access provisioning, and deprovisioning workflows; ensure proper logging and approvals for elevated access and administrative privileges.
Participate in project workstreams to deploy new systems, migrate infrastructure, or expand services, ensuring operational readiness and runbook delivery before cutover.
Maintain assets and configuration records in CMDB or asset management systems; implement tagging and lifecycle change tracking to support incident and change correlation.
Provide tier-2 and tier-3 support for escalated service desk tickets; translate business impact into technical priority and close the loop with end users.
Conduct proactive risk analysis and implement mitigations for single points of failure; lead reliability improvements and resilience engineering efforts.
Regularly review logs and telemetry for anomalies using SIEM/observability tools and escalate suspected security incidents in collaboration with Security Operations.
Drive continuous improvement initiatives including automation of manual tasks, reducing MTTR, improving change success rates, and refining capacity forecasting.

Secondary Functions

Support ad-hoc reporting requests and operational data analysis to provide insights on uptime, incident trends, and SLA adherence.
Contribute to the organization's operational playbooks, long-term service reliability roadmap, and technical debt remediation plans.
Collaborate with development teams to translate operational requirements into engineering specifications and to harden services for production use.
Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies to align operations work with product delivery and cross-functional releases.
Mentor junior operations staff and participate in knowledge-sharing sessions, training, and onboarding.
Assist with procurement evaluations for infrastructure tools and services; participate in POC testing and vendor comparisons.
Run periodic tabletop exercises and disaster recovery drills to validate readiness and refine communication plans.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Incident management and ITIL processes: triage, RCA, postmortems, change control, SLA management.
Monitoring and observability: hands-on with Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, Nagios, Zabbix, Splunk, ELK/Elastic Stack.
Cloud platforms: operational experience with AWS, Microsoft Azure, and/or Google Cloud Platform (EC2, S3, VPC, IAM, Azure VM, GCP Compute).
Scripting and automation: Python, Bash, PowerShell for automation, orchestration, and troubleshooting.
Configuration management & IaC: Terraform, CloudFormation, Ansible, Puppet, or Chef.
Virtualization & containerization: VMware, Hyper-V, Docker, Kubernetes (k8s) administration and troubleshooting.
Networking fundamentals: TCP/IP, DNS, DHCP, VLANs, routing, firewalls and load balancers.
System administration: Windows Server, Active Directory, Linux distributions (RHEL/CentOS/Ubuntu).
CI/CD and build tools: Jenkins, GitLab CI, CircleCI, or similar.
Logging and security tools: Splunk, Elastic Stack, SIEM platforms, endpoint protection fundamentals.
Backup & disaster recovery technologies: Veeam, NetBackup, Rubrik, snapshot and replication strategies.
Database fundamentals and troubleshooting: SQL, basic performance tuning for relational databases.
Ticketing and ITSM platforms: ServiceNow, Jira Service Desk, Zendesk.
Performance monitoring and capacity planning tools; cost management and tagging in cloud environments.
Knowledge of compliance frameworks and controls (GDPR, SOC2, PCI-DSS) as they apply to operational processes.

Soft Skills

Strong written and verbal communication — clear incident updates and runbook documentation.
Analytical problem solving with a bias toward root cause identification and prevention.
Prioritization and time management in high-pressure, on-call environments.
Customer service orientation and ability to translate technical issues for non-technical stakeholders.
Collaborative teamwork across engineering, product, security, and vendor teams.
Adaptability and continuous learning mindset to keep pace with cloud and automation trends.
Attention to detail for change controls, configuration drift, and compliance tasks.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Associate degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, or related field; or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Education:

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

Relevant Fields of Study:

Computer Science
Information Technology / Systems
Network Engineering
Software Engineering
Cybersecurity

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

2 to 5 years of hands-on IT operations, system administration, cloud operations, or relevant support experience.

Preferred:

3+ years in an enterprise operations environment with on-call experience and demonstrated ownership of incidents and operational runbooks.
Preferable certifications: ITIL Foundation, AWS Certified SysOps Administrator or Solutions Architect (Associate), Microsoft Azure Administrator, CompTIA Network+/Security+, or Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA).