What is L1 in DevOps?
L1 stands for Level 1 Support in the context of DevOps or IT operations. It is the first line of support for monitoring, incidents, and basic troubleshooting in the software delivery and infrastructure lifecycle.
In DevOps, L1 is primarily reactive, handling alerts, tickets, and basic operational issues before escalating to higher levels (L2/L3).
2.Who is involved in L1 DevOps?
People involved in L1 support typically include:
L1 DevOps Engineer / DevOps Support Engineer: Handles first-level alerts and tickets.
Operations / IT Support Team Members: May overlap with L1 duties.
Monitoring & Alerting System Administrators (like Grafana, Prometheus admins).
L1 interacts with:
Developers (for unclear tickets or deployment issues)
L2/L3 DevOps or SREs (for escalations)
End-users or clients reporting incidents
- What to focus on in L1 DevOps?
Key focus areas for L1:
1.Monitoring & Alerts
Watch dashboards (Grafana, Kibana) for system health
Respond to alert notifications (CPU, memory, disk, service down)
2.Incident Management
Logging incidents in ticketing systems (Jira, ServiceNow)
Acknowledging alerts and categorizing severity
Performing basic triage before escalation
3.Basic Troubleshooting
Restarting services or applications
Checking logs to identify obvious issues
Network, disk, or permission checks
4.Documentation & Reporting
Maintaining knowledge base for recurring issues
Providing clear handover notes for L2/L3
5.Automation Awareness
Using simple scripts/playbooks for repetitive tasks (like Ansible, Shell scripts)
Following runbooks for standard operating procedures
4.Responsibilities of L1 DevOps
Responsibility Details
Monitoring & Alerts: Observing dashboards, responding to notifications for CPU, memory, disk usage, or application failures.
Incident Management: Logging, categorizing, and triaging issues before escalation.
Basic Troubleshooting: Restarting services, checking logs, performing routine checks, following runbooks.
Communication & Documentation: Updating tickets, notifying stakeholders, maintaining SOPs and knowledge bases.
Routine Operations: Backup verification, log rotation, and patch checks.
Automation Awareness: Using scripts or playbooks for repetitive tasks, following predefined procedures.
5.Key Points
L1 is mostly reactive, not designing or building systems.
Focus is on stability and uptime, following standard procedures.
L1 does not usually modify production architecture; any risky actions are escalated.
It's entry-level, but a strong L1 engineer understands monitoring tools, incident flow, and basic scripting.
💡 Tip: L1 is the foundation for higher DevOps roles. A good L1 engineer who learns from incidents, tools, and runbooks can advance to L2/L3 or SRE roles.
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