Application Support - DevOps Engineer at Altron Bytes Systems Integration

Job Function:

• This is an operational environment, supporting both platform and application (and as such end-users with application issues) and not just platform related issues
• Provide monitoring/support/investigation/fault administration on 3rd Party applications
• Analysis of failures and trends on 3rd Party applications
• Stakeholder Communication
• 24/7 Support within a digital environment

Responsibilities:

• On line monitoring, administration and support of 3rd Party applications running on various platforms ranging from Microsoft Windows, UNIX utilising Oracle/Microsoft SQL Databases in a production environment
• Provide operational & business support for various 3rd Party applications running in an online production environment to ensure service is provided within customer Service Level Agreements
• Monitor, log, investigate and resolve failures on transaction processing applications
• Liaising with and provide assistance to customer representatives during problem resolution
• Provide accurate and clear verbal and written reporting for application failure investigations and resolution
• Perform scheduled daily, weekly monthly support tasks
• Perform investigations on application support techniques to continually improve operational support and simplify achievement of customer SLAs
• Perform proactive analysis of failures and trends on 3rd Party applications and data to improve service levels
• Conduct routine maintenance, upgrades and deployment of 3rd Party applications
• Provide assistance and training to BSI support team members
• Provide application performance information and participate in periodic support compliance audits
• Perform after hours standby support on 3rd Party applications running in a production environment
• Comply with the business footprint shift requirements of the Online support team
• Doing application deployments
• Investigating client or end user issues on the application (such as data purchases that have failed, or transfer of data that may have failed
• Switching environments from production to DR in readiness for releases
• Syncing environments
• Investigations into whether any applications issues are from the Online side or one of the other downstream systems.
• Application health checks
• Scaling up and down the cluster for each service (memory, CPU etc. for each configured service).
• Configuring docker and Kubernetes
• Patching of the Linux servers
• Patching the application
• Monitoring of dashboards and alerts and responding to outages (fix the issue or switch to DR to restore service)
• Configure dashboards for monitoring and alerts
• System health checks 
• This role also requires the incumbent to look at tools like Grafana, Kibana, Prometheus, AppDynamics (new tool), Dynatrace (being replaced by AppDynamics) Being able to investigate issues from an app or platform level on these tools (and others) Also automation both from a platform and application perspective.

Education Required:

• Relevant degree or diploma
• AIX, Unix certification advantageous

Experience Required:

• Minimum 3 years application support experience or 5 years general IT support experience
• AIX, Unix and WebLogic experience
• Experience in and digital or web based application
• AGILE – Must have worked in an Agile environment

Essential Competencies:

• Knowledge of the disciplines in an application support environment, incident handling, change management etc.
• Sound problem solving exposure at application and business transaction level
• Commitment to routine as well as investigation/analysis work
• Knowledge of AIX and UNIX operating systems and databases
• Ability to understand and write SQL Database queries (Oracle/Microsoft SQL)
• Ability to solve medium to high complexity problems
• DevOps – Must know the principles of DevOps and understand the framework
• Self-motivated, proactive, taking ownership of problems through to completion
• Mature person with the sense of responsibility to work on shifts and standby

Advantageous Competencies:

• Microservices – Must have worked with Docker, Kubernetes, Cloud (AWS or Google), configuring PODS, restarting services, Containerisation, Deployments 
• Monitoring tools – Dynatrace, Prometheus, Kibana, Grafana, SiteScope. Must be able to read dashboards and interpret them. Be able to investigate alerts proactively and find resolutions to prevent the alerts happening again. (OpsGenie experience a bonus)
• Good oral and written communication skills
• Good customer relationship skills
• Problem solving skills
• Quick learner (short initial ramp up period)