Production Support Engineer Role in IT/Software industry #DOTC_Mdb

Production Support Engineer Role in IT Industry

Hello All,

Today i will give you brief idea about Production Support . Everyone who is studying B tech CS/IT or even working as a Software developer think only about Software coding with different Technology like Python,Java,Oracle,Unix shell scripting , C, C++ etc . 

Production support person/team is responsible for monitoring the production servers, scheduled jobs, incident management and receiving incidents and requests from end-users, analyzing these and either responding to the end user with a solution or escalating it to the other IT teams. 

Let me explain you why Production Support is Crucial and important in IT/Software industry.

As a computer Science Student we know about SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle) . I am not going to explain SDLC but will go through phases of cyclcle

In SDLC we have below steps to follow:

1 > Requirement Analysis

2 > Software Designing

3> Development/Coding

4> Testing (different type of testing these days)

5> MTPP/UAT(Move to pre-Production / User Acceptance Testing)

6> MTP (Move to Production (Live)

Now MTP means the project is in live mode so here Production Support team have access to the whole system and they are responsible for any incidents/issues comes and they make sure the project will run smoothly , if any issues or escalation comes they are the SPOC(single point of Contact) and client will directly ask any issues to Production Support team via mail or ticketing System not to development team.

Ticketing System generally used by client if any issues come under application they create ticket and waiting response from Production Support team to Resolve. Ticket can be of different priority as per SLA(service level Agreement).

Ticket can be of Different types like below :

P1 ticket : Priority 1 ticket , This type of ticket should be resolve asap within max of 30 min , if not then Support team need to provide update to client every 10 minute and in between they can open the bridge call and engage different team like development ,network team , level2 and level3 support team etc to resolve the issue because P1 issue will impact the business user directly . Issue can be like Application down and user will not able to access the page etc.

P2 ticket : Priority 2 ticket , This type of tickets we need to resolve in the given timeline as per SLA . issues like report data is not reflecting for few modules then PS team needs to do RCA (Root cause Analysis) and also if they need any help from development team they can check with them and resolve the issue and update the same in tool.

P3 tickets :Priority 3 tickets is basically when some user is impacted where he/she not able to find reports etc then we need to take care and resolve the issue and update the same within timeline , here we can take time if any other priority issue  is there so no need to panic as P3 issue we can resolve it later. Sometimes P3 issue is common so we make SOP for repeated issues and follow the same step to resolve the issue.

P4 tickets :Priority 4 ticket is not very crucial as it will not impact business directly so the support team have time to resolve the issue , sometime issue relates with other things then we need to update the log in ticketing tool and close the ticket

Note : Apart from Ticket Production support team is involve in the system where all the jobs are scheduled . Nowdays Job scheduled on dependencies so 1^st job is completed then 2^nd job needs to be completed in timeline as thousands of jobs is running at the same time if any job is long running or stuck somewhere then Production Support team needs to handle that job on priority as it will impact the whole process . So doing this Production support team needs to very active for Monitoring job , Long running Jobs , Failed Jobs etc. Here Job means script,code, shell scripts etc . Nowdays we can schedule the jobs in unix (cronjob)  , tolls like Autosys , Control M etc . Autosys , Control M etc are GUI (Graphical user Interface) where you can see the job status easily it’s easy to see fail , long running job etc . If everything is green it means we are fine with Application.

So in IT industry Production Support Engineer play a vital role to make live application stable as in SDLC we test with few data and in Live data will be huge so need to take care of performance tuning of job etc on regular basis.

Production Support  Team also divided into three parts to make sure everything is fine and if development or other team required then only they want to Involve.

Team are like L1 (level1 team) , L2 (Level2 team ) , L3 (Level 3 Team).

Note : The Production Support Analyst is responsible for diagnosing and resolving application issues to ensure optimal performance and usability for the various system users and providing root cause analysis with recommendations for improvements.

Here we can differentiate how Production Support Engineer Differs from Software Development, Testing and Designing team . As Production Support Engineer needs to be very active and should have knowledge in Front end as well as backend process and operating system knowledge.

Production Support Topic is huge as so many things comes under this like Change Management , Release Management , Migration etc . But for fresher and Low experience candidate I think this much of knowledge is enough to work on Production Support Projects . But since they are working on live so needs to be very careful if they write or make any changes in code as it will impact directly to business . If they thing codes needs to be changes for performance they need to test it in UAT environment first.

If you Guys want I will go through more about Production Support topics like Change management , Release Management etc.

Please feel free to touch with me if you have any question.

Incident Flow Chart:

 Thanks