Production support

Production support is the practices and disciplines of supporting the IT systems/applications which are currently being used by the end users. A production support person/team is responsible for 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. These teams may include developers, system engineers and database administrators.

In order to understand the importance of production support, one needs to take a few factors into account.

From the factors listed above, one can see that the way in which production support is managed is extremely crucial.

The major steps for Production Support are as below. These Production Support steps are in context of the Batch processing.

Usually a batch job or group of related batch jobs (schedule/stream) runs to accomplish one or more business functions. These batch jobs run unattended and normally complete without any errors or issues. However, sometimes the batch job can have a break/interruption/abend/abort. There could be several reasons why a job could abend.

When a job abends, it can send out an automated alert notification via e-mail, page, text. Also, data center or operations team is also actively monitoring the jobs. They also send alert notification using e-mail, page, text or they can call the on call person responsible for the recovery of the abended job.

The on call person acknowledges the e-mail, page, text or phone call for the abended job. The on call person also records the abended job details in a production issue tracking system. Sometimes, the abended job automatically records the job abend details along with job standard list (job log) in a production issue tracking system. The abended job details (job standard list, error log files, etc.) are available in the production job scheduler tool. The Production issue tracking tool creates a request number and this request number is given to the support team. This request number is used to track the progress of the production support issue. The request is assigned to on call support team person.

For critical Production Errors (e.g. Production job is in critical path and is likely to delay the batch completion SLAs and if the Production error is impacting business data), an e-mail is sent to entire organization or impacted teams so that they are aware of the issue. They are also provided with the estimated time for Production error recovery.

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