A day in the life of...

I begin my day by checking the online support board, which we use to manage email tickets for our customers. The ticket system is invaluable to our support staff because it makes the tracking and resolution of a problem far easier than standard email. Although each member of support staff assumes responsibility for specific tickets, our entire team can see and respond to any ticket, so it's quite useful to be able to draw on a colleague's area of expertise by flagging a ticket to them.

The support board really acts as a central hub for the day: we constantly monitor it for customer responses, and often create new tickets after fielding a support phone call where further investigation is required. In addition, many of our network and server monitors feed into the support board as well, so it's a good basic indicator of the current state of play.

Another important task for the start of the day is to check through server logwatch emails. These allow us to spot any potential hardware issues and abnormal activity, and form part of the proactive monitoring activities which we're required to perform throughout the day. Other tasks that fall under this category include network monitoring using MRTG (keeping an eye on traffic patterns), and server/service monitoring.

We have various tools to help with this job, including NAGIOS which alerts us via email and pager when a server or service develops a fault, and SIM, a program that additionally monitors the load of a server. SIM can also restart services if they stop, which helps to reduce potential downtime, and doesn't require our intervention - a real benefit to us if it's a busy day!

Server and network security form a further key part of my role, so on a day to day basis, I will typically be involved in the management of server security patches and firewall rules. Patches are installed as and when they are released, whilst we update firewall rules to block people from our networks whom we have identified as attempting to gain unauthorised access in the logwatch emails (mentioned earlier). There are also some situations where we make manual changes to certain settings when we discover a security risk that is not addressed by a patch.

The various other duties that we perform could really be described as reactive, revolving around customer support and consultancy requests. These can range from routine tasks such as carrying out a server installation, or guiding a customer through managing their mail accounts on the phone, through to more involved tasks such as troubleshooting or installing an application (forum software and Rails apps for example). We also manage a lot of domain names and the associated DNS for our customers, so I would expect to look after quite a few requests in this area.

From time to time a server will need to be restored to a backup, or if there is a more serious hardware failure (no hardware is 100% reliable!) we have so-called "hot spare" devices that we can migrate a customer to. When these kinds of incidents occur, they take precidence over more routine tasks, and we have plans and processes in place to help make recovery as fast as possible.

If things are quiet on the support front, we're given the opportunity to research new technologies and take responsibility for our own training and learning, which is something I enjoy doing.

From a personal viewpoint, I like the fact that my job offers a good deal of variety, and I enjoy helping and hopefully being valued as a key part of our customers' businesses. It's especially satisfying when I receive a thank you from a customer that I've worked hard with to resolve a tricky situation - I think when we go the extra mile it's really appreciated.

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