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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Operations Support Agent

💰 $ - $

OperationsIT SupportTechnical SupportDevOpsCustomer Success

🎯 Role Definition

An Operations Support Agent is the frontline technical operator responsible for ensuring the availability, stability, and performance of production systems and services. This role proactively monitors alerts, triages incidents, executes remediation steps, coordinates cross-functional escalations, and documents operational procedures. The Operations Support Agent acts as the bridge between customers, support teams, engineering, and third-party vendors to restore service quickly and to prevent recurrence through post-incident analysis and continuous improvement.

Key focus areas: incident response, ticket lifecycle management, monitoring and observability, change execution support, access & configuration management, routine operational tasks, and customer-facing communication under Service Level Agreements (SLAs).

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Junior IT Support / Helpdesk Technician
  • Network Operations Center (NOC) Technician
  • Customer Support Engineer

Advancement To:

  • Senior Operations Support / Senior NOC Engineer
  • Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)
  • Incident Manager / IT Operations Manager

Lateral Moves:

  • DevOps Engineer
  • Cloud Operations Engineer
  • Application Support Engineer

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Monitor production environments and service health using monitoring and observability platforms (Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, Nagios) to detect and respond to alerts within defined SLA windows; perform first-response triage and assessment for high-severity incidents.
  • Manage the full ticket lifecycle in ITSM tools (ServiceNow, Jira Service Desk, Zendesk) — create, triage, prioritize, update, and resolve incidents and requests while maintaining clear, timely status communications to stakeholders and customers.
  • Triage and troubleshoot infrastructure and application issues across Linux and Windows server environments, using logs, metrics, tracing, and debugging tools to identify root cause and implement workarounds or permanent fixes.
  • Execute runbook procedures and operational playbooks for routine and emergency tasks (restarts, cache clears, service restarts, configuration rollbacks) and escalate to engineering teams when incidents exceed runbook scope.
  • Participate in on-call rotations to provide 24/7 incident coverage, including night/weekend support, carrying responsibility for critical incident response, notification, and escalation coordination.
  • Perform service restarts, configuration changes, and scheduled maintenance with strict adherence to change control policies; coordinate change windows with stakeholders and update change tickets.
  • Coordinate cross-functional escalations: communicate incident context, impact, logs, and mitigation steps to application owners, platform engineering, network teams, and third-party vendors until resolution.
  • Lead or contribute to post-incident reviews (PIRs/RCAs), documenting timelines, impact, root cause analysis, corrective actions, and preventative steps to reduce recurrence and improve operational resilience.
  • Maintain and continuously improve runbooks, standard operating procedures (SOPs), and knowledge base articles so that operational knowledge is captured, searchable, and reproducible.
  • Execute operational tasks including user account management and access control (IAM), password resets, access provisioning and deprovisioning, and coordination with security teams for privileged access.
  • Maintain alerting thresholds, escalation policies, and monitoring dashboards to reduce noise and ensure alerts are actionable and aligned with business priorities and SLAs.
  • Support deployment and release activities by validating post-deploy health checks, monitoring rollouts, and initiating rollback procedures when necessary in coordination with release managers and DevOps teams.
  • Conduct capacity and performance monitoring for compute, storage, and network resources and escalate trends that may impact availability or costs; contribute to capacity planning discussions.
  • Run backups, snapshots, and disaster recovery (DR) procedures; regularly validate backup integrity and participate in scheduled DR exercises and failover testing.
  • Perform routine patching and security updates in collaboration with security engineering and operations teams, ensuring compliance with patch windows and minimizing production risk.
  • Manage vendor relationships and third-party support engagements: open vendor tickets, escalate hardware/cloud issues, validate vendor fixes, and ensure SLA adherence from suppliers.
  • Create and deliver clear, customer-facing communications during incidents: status updates, estimated resolution times, impact summaries, and post-incident summaries that adhere to incident communications playbooks.
  • Produce operational reports and KPIs (uptime, MTTR, MTTA, incident volume, SLAs met) on daily/weekly/monthly cadence to inform leadership and drive improvements.
  • Drive automation of repetitive tasks using scripts or runbook automation (Bash, PowerShell, Python, or native automation tools) to reduce manual toil and human error and to improve mean time to repair.
  • Conduct system health checks, log aggregation review, and periodic audits (config drift, certificate expiry, SSL/TLS checks) to proactively identify risks before they impact customers.
  • Participate in change advisory board (CAB) meetings and support post-change verifications; document outcomes and any corrective follow-ups required after changes.
  • Ensure compliance with internal controls, regulatory requirements, and security policies (SOC, ISO, HIPAA where applicable), assisting internal/external audits with requested artifacts and operational evidence.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory operational analysis to identify trends, recurring incidents, and opportunities for automation or architectural improvements.
  • Contribute to the organization's operational strategy and roadmap by highlighting system weaknesses, proposing remediation, and helping prioritize technical debt reduction.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate customer-impacting issues into engineering requirements and to implement monitoring that aligns with product objectives.
  • Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within platform, site reliability, and operations teams to ensure operational work (alerts tuning, runbook creation, automation tasks) is planned and delivered.
  • Mentor junior operations staff, provide training on runbooks, monitoring tooling, and incident processes, and participate in knowledge-sharing sessions to uplift team capabilities.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Service Desk & Ticketing: Proficient with ServiceNow, Jira Service Desk, Zendesk or similar ITSM platforms for ticket lifecycle, SLA tracking, and change management.
  • Monitoring & Observability: Hands-on experience with Datadog, Prometheus/Grafana, Splunk, New Relic, or Nagios for alerting, metrics, logging, and dashboards.
  • Operating Systems: Strong troubleshooting on Linux (Ubuntu, CentOS, RHEL) and Windows Server platforms including system logs, process management, and package management.
  • Networking Fundamentals: TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP/S, load balancing, firewalls, and basic routing knowledge necessary to triage network-related incidents.
  • Scripting & Automation: Ability to write and maintain scripts in Bash, Python, or PowerShell to automate operational tasks and integrate tooling.
  • Cloud Platforms: Operational experience with one or more cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP) including common services (EC2, S3, VPC, IAM, CloudWatch).
  • Observability & Logging: Proficient in log aggregation and analysis (Splunk, ELK/Elastic Stack) and tracing fundamentals (Jaeger, OpenTelemetry).
  • Incident Management & ITIL Practices: Familiarity with ITIL concepts, incident lifecycle, RCA, and SLA-driven support.
  • Access & Identity: Experience with IAM, Active Directory, SSO, and role-based access controls; ability to manage user provisioning and handle sensitive access requests.
  • Databases & Queries: Basic SQL skills for querying relational databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL) and understanding data access patterns.
  • Release & Change Support: Experience supporting deployments, feature rollouts, and change control processes in CI/CD environments (GitLab, Jenkins, GitHub Actions).
  • Security Hygiene: Knowledge of patching processes, certificate management, vulnerability remediation tracking, and secure operational practices.
  • Observability Tuning & Alerting: Ability to tune alerts to reduce noise and configure meaningful thresholds and escalation paths.
  • Backup & DR Procedures: Experience running and validating backups, snapshots, and DR failover processes.
  • Vendor Coordination Tools: Experience working with vendors and cloud provider support systems (AWS Support, Azure Support, vendor ticket portals).

Soft Skills

  • Clear, concise customer-facing communication — able to translate technical status into business-impact language for non-technical stakeholders.
  • Strong analytical and problem-solving mindset to diagnose complex incidents using limited initial data and logs.
  • Composure under pressure with the ability to drive incident resolution through ownership and calm escalation.
  • Collaborative team player — comfortable coordinating cross-functional responses across engineering, product, and vendor teams.
  • Detail-oriented with strong documentation habits to ensure runbooks, post-incident reviews, and SOPs are accurate and actionable.
  • Time management and prioritization to balance reactive incident work with proactive operational improvements.
  • Continuous improvement mindset — seeks root causes and automation opportunities rather than repeated manual fixes.
  • Customer empathy and service orientation to manage expectations and deliver high-quality incident resolution experiences.
  • Adaptability to changing priorities in a fast-paced production environment.
  • Teaching and mentoring ability to onboard and develop junior operations staff.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • High school diploma or equivalent with demonstrated technical aptitude and relevant certifications (CompTIA A+/Network+, or vendor/cloud certifications).

Preferred Education:

  • Associate's or Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Information Systems, Engineering, or a related technical field.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Information Technology / Systems
  • Network Engineering
  • Software Engineering
  • Cybersecurity

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 1–5 years in IT operations, technical support, NOC, or production support roles.

Preferred:

  • 3+ years supporting production services, including on-call rotations and incident management; experience with cloud platforms (AWS/Azure/GCP), monitoring stacks (Datadog/Prometheus/Splunk), and ITSM tools (ServiceNow/Jira).

Preferred certifications (optional but valuable): ITIL Foundation, AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner or AWS SysOps Associate, Microsoft Azure Fundamentals/Administrator, CompTIA Network+/Security+, or vendor-specific monitoring/tool certifications.

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