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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for IT Ops Analyst

💰 $70,000 - $110,000

IT OperationsInfrastructureSupportCloudDevOps

🎯 Role Definition

An IT Ops Analyst (IT Operations Analyst) is responsible for ensuring reliable day-to-day operation of production systems, supporting infrastructure health, and delivering operational excellence across on-premises and cloud environments. The role focuses on incident management, monitoring, configuration and change control, automation of repetitive tasks, and cross-team collaboration with engineering, security, and application teams. Ideal candidates blend systems administration, networking knowledge, cloud platform experience (AWS, Azure, GCP), monitoring tooling (Splunk, Datadog, Nagios), scripting/automation (Python, Bash, PowerShell), and an ITIL-informed approach to service delivery.

Key SEO phrases: IT Ops Analyst, incident response, systems administration, cloud operations, monitoring and alerting, automation, ITIL, Service Desk, change management.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Junior Systems Administrator with exposure to monitoring and ticketing workflows.
  • IT Support / Desktop Support with escalation and change-control experience.
  • Cloud Support Engineer or Site Reliability intern with hands-on monitoring skills.

Advancement To:

  • Senior IT Operations Engineer / Lead IT Ops Analyst
  • Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) or Production Engineer
  • Infrastructure Engineer or Cloud Operations Engineer
  • IT Operations Manager or Head of Infrastructure

Lateral Moves:

  • DevOps Engineer (automation and CI/CD focus)
  • Platform Engineer (platform and tooling ownership)
  • Security Operations Analyst (if security monitoring is emphasized)

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Own incident response for infrastructure and platform-level alerts, acting as initial responder, coordinating with application and network teams, driving root cause analysis, and ensuring timely incident resolution and communication to stakeholders.
  • Triage, prioritize, and resolve service desk tickets and escalations related to servers, cloud resources, networking, storage, and application availability while maintaining SLAs and accurate status updates in the ITSM tool (e.g., ServiceNow, Jira Service Management).
  • Configure, tune, and maintain monitoring and alerting systems (Splunk, Datadog, Prometheus, Nagios, Zabbix) to ensure accurate detection of outages, performance degradation, and security events, and continuously reduce false positives.
  • Execute and validate change requests and participate in the change advisory process, ensuring configuration management compliance, rollback plans, and post-change verification to minimize production impact.
  • Maintain and administer Linux and Windows server environments including provisioning, patch management, hardening, filesystem and account management, and performance optimization across physical and virtual/multi-cloud environments.
  • Deploy, manage, and optimize cloud infrastructure (AWS, Azure, GCP) resources using native consoles and Infrastructure-as-Code tools (Terraform, CloudFormation) to maintain reproducible, version-controlled infrastructure.
  • Develop, maintain, and run automation scripts and runbooks (Python, Bash, PowerShell) to automate on-call procedures, routine maintenance, and remediation for faster Mean Time To Repair (MTTR).
  • Monitor capacity and performance metrics for compute, storage, and network resources and provide forecasting, cost optimization recommendations, and scaling plans to avoid service degradation.
  • Perform proactive log analysis and correlation using centralized logging solutions (Splunk, ELK) to identify anomalies, trends, and pre-emptive issues before they escalate into incidents.
  • Participate in on-call rotation and after-hours incident response, maintaining clear incident documentation, timelines, and artifact capture to support RCA and continuous improvement.
  • Configure and manage CI/CD pipelines and integrations with deployment tooling to support safe, repeatable deployments and operational rollbacks in collaboration with development and release teams.
  • Implement and enforce backup, snapshot, and disaster recovery procedures, validate recovery operations regularly, and ensure Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) targets are met.
  • Manage network devices and connectivity troubleshooting (firewalls, routers, switches, load balancers), including NAT, routing, TLS/SSL, and VPN, working closely with network engineering to resolve cross-domain issues.
  • Ensure security best practices are incorporated into operations, including vulnerability patching, privilege management, logging compliance, and coordination with InfoSec for incident containment.
  • Create and maintain clear runbooks, operational runbooks, and internal knowledgebase articles to standardize responses and enable team scalability and new hire onboarding.
  • Maintain configuration and state management using tools like Ansible, Chef, or Puppet to ensure consistent server configuration and compliance across environments.
  • Conduct quarterly post-incident reviews and continuous improvement initiatives to reduce incident recurrence, refine alert thresholds, and improve operational runbooks and automation.
  • Validate and onboard new infrastructure and third-party SaaS integrations, conducting operational readiness reviews, risk analysis, and performance validation prior to production rollouts.
  • Collaborate with application and product owners to translate operational requirements into architecture and capacity decisions and provide guidance for deployment in production.
  • Track and report operational metrics (MTTR, MTBF, availability, incident trends) and present status and improvement plans to leadership and cross-functional stakeholders.
  • Manage vendor relationships for critical infrastructure services, coordinate escalations, and ensure vendor SLAs and support models are documented and optimized.
  • Participate in architecture and pre-deployment review meetings, providing operational feedback on observability, scaling, backup, and failover strategies.
  • Enforce and contribute to compliance and audit activities, providing evidence of operational controls, patching cycles, backup/restore tests, and access management procedures.
  • Lead or contribute to pilot projects for new tooling or platform changes that reduce toil, improve reliability, or enhance automation across the infrastructure estate.

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 in onboarding new applications to the operational monitoring platform and define SLOs, SLIs, and alerting thresholds.
  • Mentor junior operations staff, conduct training sessions on tooling and operational practices, and help build a resilient support culture.
  • Help evaluate and select new tools and vendors to modernize operations and lower operational costs.
  • Maintain inventory of infrastructure assets and cloud cost tracking to identify optimization opportunities.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Incident Management & ITSM platforms: ServiceNow, Jira Service Management, Cherwell — configure incident workflows, escalate effectively, and maintain precise incident records.
  • Monitoring & Observability: Splunk, Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/Opensearch — create dashboards, alerts, and log correlation.
  • Linux & Windows Administration: Ubuntu/CentOS/RHEL management and Windows Server administration, including patching, user management, and troubleshooting.
  • Cloud Platforms: AWS, Azure, or GCP — provisioning, IAM, VPC/networking, cost management, and best practices.
  • Scripting & Automation: Python, Bash, PowerShell — build automation for routine tasks, alert remediation, and maintenance jobs.
  • Infrastructure as Code: Terraform, CloudFormation — write, review, and maintain reproducible infrastructure.
  • Configuration Management: Ansible, Puppet, Chef — enforce consistent configuration across environments.
  • Networking Fundamentals: TCP/IP, DNS, DHCP, firewalls, load balancing — diagnose network-related production issues.
  • CI/CD & Release Tools: Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, ArgoCD — support deployment workflows and rollback procedures.
  • Backup & Disaster Recovery: Veeam, AWS Backup, snapshots — design and validate DR plans and recovery testing.
  • Logging & Log Management: ELK stack, Splunk — parse, index, and extract insights from system/application logs.
  • Security & Compliance Controls: vulnerability scanning, patch management, access control, CIS hardening guidelines.
  • Containerization & Orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes basics — troubleshoot containerized services and assist platform teams.
  • Database Fundamentals: basic administration/troubleshooting for MySQL, PostgreSQL, or managed DB services.
  • Performance & Capacity Planning: metrics analysis, trend forecasting, and cost optimization strategies.

(Include at least 10 of the above in hiring descriptions or resume keywords to maximize discoverability.)

Soft Skills

  • Strong written and verbal communication: craft incident summaries, runbooks, and cross-team escalations clearly and effectively.
  • Analytical problem-solving: ability to debug complex system interactions across infrastructure layers.
  • Prioritization and time management: manage multiple incidents and operational tasks under pressure while meeting SLA commitments.
  • Collaboration and influence: work across engineering, product, security, and vendor partners to implement changes and resolve incidents.
  • Customer/service orientation: focus on uptime, reliability, and improving user-facing service levels.
  • Continuous improvement mindset: drive automation and process enhancements to reduce manual toil.
  • Attention to detail: precise change executions and careful operational documentation.
  • Adaptability and learning agility: quickly learn new cloud services, tools, and process changes.
  • Mentoring and teaching: help junior engineers scale through documentation, pairing, and knowledge sharing.
  • Stakeholder management: present operational metrics, improvement plans, and incident retrospectives to technical and non-technical audiences.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Computer Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Education:

  • Bachelor's or Master's degree in a relevant technical discipline or equivalent professional certifications and demonstrable experience.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Information Technology / Systems
  • Network Engineering
  • Cybersecurity / Information Security
  • Cloud Computing / DevOps Engineering

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 2–6 years of hands-on IT operations, systems administration, cloud operations, or SRE-related experience.

Preferred:

  • 3–5+ years experience supporting production infrastructure in multi-cloud or hybrid environments.
  • Demonstrable experience with enterprise monitoring tools (Splunk, Datadog), cloud platforms (AWS/Azure/GCP), scripting (Python/Bash/PowerShell), and Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform/CloudFormation).
  • Preferred certifications: ITIL Foundation, AWS Certified SysOps Administrator or AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate, Microsoft Azure Administrator, CompTIA Network+/Security+, or relevant vendor certs.
  • Experience participating in on-call rotations, leading incident responses, conducting RCAs, and implementing automation to reduce MTTR and operational toil.
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