December 15, 2021

Support System in IT Industry

What is support in IT?

Support covers the practices and disciplines of supporting the IT systems/applications which are currently being used by the end users.  A production/Application support person/team is responsible for monitoring the production servers or application services, scheduled jobs, incident management and receiving incidents and requests from end-users, analysing these and either responding to the end user with a solution or if it involves change, request will be assigned to development team for the fix and revert to the end user with the resolution.

Levels of Support (L1/L2/L3):

Generally, there are 3 levels of support in IT: Level 1 (L1), Level 2 (L2), and Level 3 (L3). L1 is the first line of support that involves engaging with clients, knowing their challenge, and creating tickets against it. L1 team/person needs to have basic knowledge of product/service and ability to troubleshoot basic or basic problems. If more access or technical skills are needed to fix the problems, depending on the type of problem, then they can escalate such cases to L2 or L3 support team.

L2 support handles the tickets that L1 routes to them. They have more skills, more experience in solving complicated problems relevant to them and can guide / help L1 support people to work in troubleshooting. Any of the technical problems that require server back-end access can be solved by them. If there are problems that they cannot fix or if there are problems that need further access, then they typically escalate the cases to L3 support team.

L3 is the last line of support and typically consists of a development team that deals with technical problems. They are experts in their profession and manage the most complex issues. They alter the code, study, and improve the solution to challenge new or unknown problems.

Monitoring:

Activity monitoring software captures the use of applications and programs on the monitored workstation. The onscreen user activities are maintained in a log. This ensures that company data remains secure, and the employees are performing their assigned tasks efficiently.

Basic monitoring activities includes Server health check, CPU, and memory usage its percentage, Keep track of scheduled jobs etc

Real-time activity monitoring

Real-time activity monitoring allows you to monitor the activities taking place in real-time on a computer. You can observe and analyse all the data.

Advantages of Monitoring:

• Productive Workflow
• Monitoring offers transparency
• Reduction of impact of business with any sort of failure

Periodic Maintenance:

A periodic Maintenance is a routine type of maintenance that is performed on time basis (daily, weekly, etc) that is mostly needed to check systems and make sure they are fine and systematic.

It’s a Preventive maintenance is carried out at regular intervals. Some of them are added below,

• Periodic deletion of old logs stored in log workspaces
• DB Cleanup and storage replication verification
• Applying the patches to cloud services
• Deployment activities in different environment
• To perform clean up activity on a regular interval to maintain the system healthy
• In case of resource over consumption, make necessary clean up to maintain the healthy resource usage

Advantages of Periodic Maintenance:

• Updating the application with the latest version so that it is up to date and secure
• Regular clean up service like DB clean up helps to reduce the disk usage which allows the application to run smoothly

Application Support:

Application support is a process which ensures optimum efficiency and minimum downtime for the application to which support is provided. About providing a contact for users and managing the application to achieves its service level objectives. Application Support Analyst enable people to execute their responsibilities within the relevant business processes.

Few examples of Application support:

• Co-ordinate and support business users on application usage
• Attend and provide resolution to application related queries
• Support the business users on backend data updates
• Manually capture the issues raised and update the stakeholders regarding the progress
• To Action on application failure, apply the immediate fix with troubleshooting steps and workaround

Advantages of Application Support:

• Application support reduces the probability of failure and provide assurance of better performance of the application.
• Application support enables us to gather information of bugs, possible crash, or quality concerns while the application is running so that the issues are resolved before users experience them

Technical Support:

Technical support (Tech support) refers to a range services companies provide to their customers for products they developed. Services that entities provide to users of technology products or services. In general, technical support provides help regarding specific problems with a product or service, also provide services for the clients who has given the business as a third-party customer. The primary focus of technical support is to resolve a technical incident or problem raised.

• Troubleshooting, diagnosing, and resolving technical issues
• Training end users on how to use the new features added to the application
• Maintaining a database of reported incidents/actions taken
• On any delayed response of application, apply necessary steps to improve the performance
• Respond to malfunction of any application components and apply necessary fixes
• On application failure, apply the immediate fix

Advantages of Technical Support:

• Technical support reduces the downtime due to disrupted IT services, maximizes system uptime, and resolves end-user problems, system incidents, and technical issues.
• Technical support ensures the company to stay productive and thus maximize their benefits—cost saving, improved productivity, improved product quality, customer satisfaction.