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Become an Application / Production Support Engineer
Learn to own production stability, triage live incidents, and earn the trust of engineering teams.
CREATED BY
R
Rhea B. [PLACEHOLDER] ★ 4.9
Product Manager at FinUPI | 6+ years of experience
About this Path
Designed for freshers and career-switchers who want to start in IT as Application or Production Support Engineers. You will learn to read logs, triage incidents, use monitoring dashboards, write runbooks, and escalate effectively so you can own Tier-1 and Tier-2 support queues with confidence from day one.
Path Overview
Beginner LevelCertificate of CompletionAbout 28 hours to completeEnglish language10+ curated videosLearn online at your own pace4 modules with resourcesGamified & interactive
Path Curriculum
Navigating Linux Filesystems and Permissions
Understand directory structure, file permissions, and process ownership in production servers.
Log Parsing with grep, awk, and tail -f
Filter and stream log files to isolate error patterns under production time pressure.
Process Management and Port Troubleshooting
Use ps, netstat, and lsof to diagnose hung processes and port conflicts in live systems.
Shell Scripting for Support Automation
Write bash scripts to automate health checks, log rotation, and alert-triggered restarts.
ITIL Incident, Problem, and Change Management
Distinguish between incident resolution and root-cause problem management to prevent recurrence.
Severity Classification and SLA Management
Assign P1-P4 priorities, communicate ETAs, and escalate before breaching SLA windows.
Writing Incident Reports and Postmortems
Document timeline, impact, root cause, and action items in the format leadership expects.
Reading Dashboards in Grafana and Datadog
Interpret CPU, memory, latency, and error-rate panels to identify the blast radius of an issue.
Configuring Alert Rules and On-Call Rotations
Set threshold-based and anomaly-detection alerts that page the right team at the right time.
Distributed Tracing with Jaeger or Zipkin
Follow a request across services to find which component introduced latency or failure.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) Basics
Use New Relic or Dynatrace transaction traces to identify slow database calls and N+1 queries.
SQL for Support: SELECT, JOIN, and Data Validation
Query production databases to verify record state and support data-fix request approvals.
Writing and Maintaining Runbooks
Structure step-by-step runbooks with decision trees that a junior engineer can follow alone.
Ticketing Systems: Jira Service Management and ServiceNow
Log, categorize, and escalate tickets in the tools enterprise support teams use daily.
Growing from L1 to L2 and into Engineering
Build a track record of incident ownership and runbook authorship to accelerate promotion.
What you'll learn
- ✓Read and parse application logs in Linux environments using grep, awk, and tail to isolate errors.
- ✓Triage production incidents using structured ITIL-aligned P1/P2/P3 severity classification.
- ✓Use Grafana, Datadog, or New Relic dashboards to correlate metrics with application errors.
- ✓Write clear incident reports and postmortems that satisfy both engineering and management audiences.
- ✓Execute SQL queries against production databases to validate data integrity during incidents.
- ✓Create and maintain runbooks that reduce mean time to resolution for recurring failure patterns.