Right Attitude for Production Support

It cannot be disputed that right attitude is clearly the winner over aptitude. But what defines right attitude when it comes to production support? I am no guru in this subject, but there are few good qualities which set apart an effective production support team member.

Own the environment. It may sound quirky, production support is like looking after one's own child with whom a lot of expectations are attached. Continuous efforts to keep on track & every wrong step is an opportunity to improve a.k.a. any incident or problem upon looking deeper can result in change(s) to better the environment.

Be available. Production support requires maintaining systems which are generally 24x7. Systems don't sleep during off-business hours and quite often breaks during overnight feeds / computation. Willingness to involve and troubleshoot on every red alert is an implicit job requirement.

Never assume. There is nothing called the dumb question. The biggest mistake is not to ask a question when in doubt. Just
ensure to document it and not ask the same question many a times.

Always document. Any new piece of information which may help in future troubleshooting by self or team should be published within team space like Wiki.


Keep this article posted with ideas / comments on what constitutes right attitude. Gives me opportunity to learn more :)

Proactive Production Support = DevOps

In production support world, we all have been reminded time and again that being proactive is the key to avoiding pain. I cannot agree more. 

In fact, I would like to take it a step further. Proactive approach from the inception of a new project / change.

Most of the times pro-active support is defined as having all the monitoring in place to detect & fix issues before users can experience any glitch. This approach works fine most of time. However there are still outages leading to loss (monetary / regulatory / reputational / etc). These can be mitigated further if support team involves in a much earlier phase of the project.

Generally support teams get involved when a change is ready to be packaged and deployed. An early involvement of support team can identify major maintenance related issues which are generally not taken in account by Development teams. Whether it is log file management, memory management, DB growth, Firewall issues, the list goes on. This will also help in better support documentation and released components will not be just a black box for the support team. Many times new releases require new/modified support tools as well which are better identified pro-actively.

Information is the best weapon for support staff. Early engagement of support will increase the quality of support documentation which can be built upon as and when the project moves into different phases.