Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Operations Support Analyst

🎯 Role Definition

The Operations Support Analyst is a frontline technical role responsible for ensuring reliable day-to-day production operations across applications, infrastructure and business processes. This role owns incident management, escalations, monitoring, runbook execution and continuous improvement initiatives to reduce downtime, optimize SLA adherence and deliver excellent internal and customer-facing support. The ideal candidate pairs technical troubleshooting skills (logs, SQL, scripting) with strong communication, documentation, and stakeholder management.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Help Desk Technician or IT Support Specialist transitioning to production-focused responsibilities.
Systems Administrator or Junior Cloud Operations Engineer moving into service-level ownership.
Technical Support Engineer or Customer Support Analyst with exposure to incident escalations.

Advancement To:

Senior Operations Support Analyst / Lead Operations Analyst
Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) or DevOps Engineer
Operations Manager / Incident Manager / Service Delivery Manager
Technical Program Manager or Platform Reliability Lead

Lateral Moves:

Service Delivery Manager
Business Systems Analyst with an operational focus
DevOps / Automation Engineer
Product Operations or Customer Reliability Engineer

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Serve as the first- and second-line responder for production incidents: triage alerts, gather diagnostics (logs, metrics, traces), reproduce issues, and coordinate cross-functional resolution until service restoration within SLA.
Own incident management lifecycle in ticketing platforms (ServiceNow, JIRA, Zendesk): ensure accurate classification, priority, status updates, stakeholder notifications and proper closure documentation.
Execute and maintain runbooks and standard operating procedures (SOPs) to respond to common incidents and perform routine operational procedures with minimal guidance.
Monitor system availability, performance and business metrics using tools such as Datadog, Splunk, New Relic or CloudWatch; tune alerts and thresholds to reduce noise and improve MTTR.
Perform root cause analysis (RCA) and create post-incident reports with clear remediation steps, timelines, and owners to prevent recurrence and inform product/engineering roadmaps.
Collaborate daily with engineering, product, QA and customer success teams to prioritize operational fixes, escalate blockers and align on hotfix or release timelines.
Implement automation for repetitive operational tasks through scripting (Python, Bash, PowerShell) and orchestration tools to reduce manual toil and error-prone steps.
Coordinate change management activities—schedule maintenance windows, communicate expected impact to stakeholders, validate rollbacks and document change outcomes.
Manage access control and user provisioning tasks in production systems following security and compliance guidelines (least privilege, audit logs).
Runpre- and post-deployment checks, support release engineering during deploy windows, validate health checks and rollback when necessary.
Maintain and update a searchable knowledge base and operational runbook library so on-call and support teams can resolve incidents faster.
Provide on-call coverage and incident escalation support during nights and weekends as part of a rotation; deliver clear, timely communication to executives and customers during critical incidents.
Produce operational dashboards and weekly/monthly reports (SLA adherence, incident trends, MTTR, service availability) for leadership and continuous improvement planning.
Reconcile data and system discrepancies by conducting integrity checks and collaborating with data engineers to ensure accurate reporting and analytics.
Coordinate with third-party vendors and cloud providers for escalations, outages and change requests to restore dependent services and follow up on vendor RCAs.
Perform capacity-related monitoring and forecasting, recommending proactive remediation to avoid performance bottlenecks or degraded customer experience.
Support business continuity and disaster recovery efforts by participating in DR planning, tabletop exercises and live failover testing; document results and improvement actions.
Triage, prioritize and resolve service requests and operational tickets, ensuring a high level of service quality and timely resolution to internal and external customers.
Capture technical details, screenshots, logs and reproducible steps for engineering handoffs; escalate complex defects to product engineering with clear impact statements.
Drive small-to-medium automation and efficiency projects (cron job consolidation, alert suppression rules, runbook automation) from scoping through implementation and measurement.
Mentor and train new operations analysts, run knowledge transfer sessions, and contribute to a culture of blameless postmortems and continual learning.
Maintain security hygiene for operational processes: apply patching schedules, validate backups, rotate credentials and follow incident response workflows in partnership with security teams.
Participate in performance tuning of databases and critical services, running queries, analyzing slow queries, and working with DBAs to remediate hotspots.
Support regulatory and compliance tasks by providing evidence, logs and process documentation during audits or compliance assessments.

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.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Incident management and SLA-driven operations experience (ITIL fundamentals preferred).
Hands-on experience with ticketing and ITSM tools: ServiceNow, JIRA, Zendesk or similar.
Strong observability and monitoring tool knowledge: Splunk, Datadog, New Relic, Grafana, CloudWatch.
Log analysis and diagnostics using Splunk/ELK and familiarity with distributed tracing principles.
Practical SQL skills for querying production databases and supporting data validation and reconciliation.
Scripting and automation with Python, Bash, PowerShell or similar to automate runbooks and operational tasks.
Comfortable working across Linux and Windows server environments; basic shell and system administration commands.
Familiarity with cloud platforms and services (AWS, Azure or GCP) and common operational constructs (IAM, EC2, S3, VPC).
Version control and CI/CD tooling awareness (Git, Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions) to validate deployments and troubleshoot pipeline failures.
Basic networking and DNS troubleshooting skills (TCP/IP, load balancers, firewall rules).
Experience creating and maintaining runbooks, operational documentation and post-incident reports.
Data analysis and reporting skills using Excel, Google Sheets or BI tools to create operational KPIs and trend analyses.
Knowledge of security incident response workflows and ability to collaborate with security teams for containment and remediation.
Familiarity with containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes) at an operational level is a plus.
Ability to configure and tune alerting thresholds, deduplication rules and on-call routing to optimize signal-to-noise.

Soft Skills

Clear, concise written and verbal communication for incident updates, status reports and stakeholder engagement.
Strong problem-solving and analytical mindset with a bias toward root-cause resolution and long-term fixes.
Excellent prioritization and time-management skills in high-pressure, multi-incident contexts.
Customer-first orientation and empathy when handling internal and external stakeholders affected by incidents.
Collaborative team player who can coordinate across engineering, product, QA and customer success teams.
Attention to detail for documentation, postmortems and procedural compliance.
Adaptability and comfort with ambiguous, fast-changing production environments.
Initiative to proactively identify improvement opportunities and drive implementation.
Conflict resolution and escalation judgment to involve the right stakeholders at the right time.
Coaching and mentoring capability to uplift junior team members and share operational knowledge.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, IT, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Education:

Bachelor's or Associate degree plus certifications such as ITIL Foundation, CompTIA Server+/Network+, AWS Cloud Practitioner, or Certified SRE coursework.

Relevant Fields of Study:

Computer Science or Software Engineering
Information Systems or Information Technology
Network Engineering or Systems Administration
Cybersecurity, Data Analytics or Business Administration with technology focus

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 2 - 5 years in technical support, production operations, system administration or a related IT role.

Preferred: 3+ years supporting SaaS or enterprise production systems with hands-on incident management, monitoring tool experience, on-call rotations, and demonstrated automation or process improvement contributions. Experience working with cloud infrastructure and modern observability tooling is highly desirable.