Solved: Do y’all not tier support support staff anymore?

#devops #programming #tutorial #cloud

🚀 Executive Summary

TL;DR: Senior engineers are frequently paged for basic support tasks like password resets due to inadequate tooling and broken escalation paths. This issue can be resolved by empowering support staff with safe, tiered solutions, including read-only visibility, automated push-button remediation, and a cultural shift towards support engineering.

🎯 Key Takeaways

The ‘Escalation Fallacy’ causes senior engineers to be bogged down by trivial issues, hindering response to critical incidents and fostering learned helplessness in support staff.
Implementing read-only dashboards (e.g., Grafana, Kibana) or restricted SQL queries provides support staff with crucial visibility to diagnose common problems like account lockouts without direct, risky system access.
Automated ‘push-button’ solutions via runbook automation tools like Rundeck or Jenkins enable support teams to safely execute pre-defined, audited remediation scripts for common tasks, such as unlocking user accounts, without needing SSH or database credentials.

Stop getting paged for simple support tasks. This guide details practical, tiered solutions to empower your support staff, fix broken escalation paths, and give engineers their nights back.

Getting Paged for a Password Reset? It’s Time We Fixed Tiered Support.

It’s 2:17 AM. The familiar, soul-crushing siren of a PagerDuty alert rips through the silence. I fumble for my phone, eyes blurry, expecting a database failover or a Kubernetes cluster on fire. The alert reads: “CRITICAL: User ‘BigCorpClient’ unable to log in.” My heart sinks. I already know what this is. I SSH into a bastion host, run a single command against the auth-service logs, and see it plain as day: Failed login attempt limit exceeded for user: BigCorpClient. Their account is locked. I run our internal unlock script, close the ticket with “User account unlocked,” and stare at the ceiling, wondering why I, a Senior DevOps Engineer, was woken up for something Tier 1 support should have handled in 30 seconds.

This isn’t a knock on the support folks. They’re smart, capable, and on the front lines. The problem is that we, the engineers, have failed them. We’ve built fortresses around our systems, terrified of giving anyone else the keys, and in doing so, we’ve turned ourselves into the single point of failure for the most trivial of tasks.

The “Why”: The Escalation Fallacy

This problem isn’t about lazy support staff or overly complex systems. It’s a breakdown in process and tooling, rooted in what I call the “Escalation Fallacy.” We believe that restricting access and forcing escalations keeps the system safe. In reality, it creates a culture of learned helplessness for support, burns out senior engineers with ticket noise, and makes our incident response time for real emergencies slower because we’re bogged down in the small stuff.

The root cause is a lack of investment in safe, purpose-built tools for our support teams. We give them a clunky admin UI that can’t do half of what they need, and then act surprised when their only tool left is to page the on-call engineer. It’s time to fix that.

The Solutions: From Band-Aid to Brain Surgery

Here are three ways to approach this problem, from the quick-and-dirty fix you can implement tomorrow to the long-term cultural shift that will actually solve it for good.

1. The Quick Fix: The Read-Only Window

The first step is to give support visibility. They often escalate because they are flying blind. They can’t confirm the problem, so they have to assume the worst and hit the panic button.

Give them a safe, read-only view into the data they need. This isn’t about giving them psql access to prod-db-01. It’s about creating a dedicated, locked-down user or a specific dashboard.

Example: Create a read-only database user that can only run SELECT statements on the users and login\_attempts tables. Teach the support team how to use a database client to run a canned query.

-- SQL for a read-only support user to check account status
SELECT
  user_id,
  email,
  is_locked,
  lock_reason,
  last_login_attempt
FROM
  users
WHERE
  email = 'customer@example.com';

Even better, build a simple Grafana or Kibana dashboard that visualizes this data. Let them type in a username and see the account status, recent login attempts, and the reason for a lock. No command line, no risk, just pure information.

Pro Tip: Never, ever give a non-engineer direct write access to a production database. The road to a multi-hour outage is paved with good intentions and a misplaced UPDATE query without a WHERE clause.

2. The Permanent Fix: The Push-Button Solution

Visibility is great, but it doesn’t solve the problem of remediation. The next level is to provide them with safe, automated, push-button solutions for common tasks. This is where runbook automation tools like Rundeck, Jenkins, or even custom internal apps shine.

The principle is simple: you, the engineer, write and test a script that performs one specific, highly-controlled action. The support team gets a UI with a button that executes that script with pre-defined parameters.

Example: An “Unlock User Account” job in Rundeck.

You write a robust shell script, unlock-user.sh.
The script takes one argument: the username.
It performs sanity checks: Does the user exist? Is the account actually locked?
It connects to the necessary service or database and performs ONLY the unlock action.
It logs everything: who ran the script, when, and for which user.

#!/bin/bash
# unlock-user.sh - A safe script for support to run via Rundeck

USERNAME=$1

# Basic input validation
if [ -z "$USERNAME" ]; then
  echo "ERROR: Username cannot be empty."
  exit 1
fi

echo "INFO: Checking status for user '$USERNAME'..."
# In a real script, you'd have your db connection here
IS_LOCKED=$(psql -h prod-db-01 -U app_user -d proddb -t -c "SELECT is_locked FROM users WHERE username='$USERNAME'")

if [ "$IS_LOCKED" = "f" ]; then
  echo "WARNING: User '$USERNAME' is not locked. No action taken."
  exit 0
fi

echo "ACTION: Unlocking user '$USERNAME'..."
# Run the actual unlock command
psql -h prod-db-01 -U app_user -d proddb -c "UPDATE users SET is_locked=false, login_attempts=0 WHERE username='$USERNAME'"

echo "SUCCESS: User '$USERNAME' has been unlocked."

Now, support doesn’t need SSH access. They don’t need database credentials. They go to a web UI, choose the “Unlock User” job, type in the username, and click “Run”. Safe, audited, and it keeps you sleeping through the night.

3. The ‘Nuclear’ Option: The Cultural Overhaul

The first two solutions are about tools. This one is about people and process. If you find that you’re constantly building one-off tools and your support team’s needs are ever-expanding, the real problem might be your organizational structure. The ultimate fix is to stop treating support as a separate, non-technical entity.

This means:

Creating a “Support Engineering” Role: Hire or train engineers who sit within the support organization. Their job is to build the tools and automation (like the ones in Fix #2) that their team needs. They are the bridge between support and DevOps/SRE.
Investing in Training: Teach your Tier 1 and 2 staff the basics of the systems they support. How to read logs, how to use monitoring dashboards, how a basic API call works. An empowered, knowledgeable support team is your best defense against alert fatigue.
Embracing Shared Ownership: Bring support leadership into planning meetings. When you’re designing a new feature, ask them: “What will go wrong with this at 2 AM, and what information and tools will your team need to fix it without calling us?”

Warning: This is not a quick fix. It requires executive buy-in, budget, and a willingness to change how your company thinks about technical support. It’s hard, but it’s the only way to permanently solve the problem at scale.

Ultimately, every “dumb” escalation that wakes you up is a symptom of a deeper process failure. Instead of getting frustrated with the person who paged you, look at the system that forced them to do it. Fix the system, and you’ll get your sleep back.

Solution	Effort	Key Benefit
1. The Read-Only Window	Low	Immediately reduces escalations caused by lack of visibility.
2. The Push-Button Solution	Medium	Empowers support to safely perform remediation actions without direct access.
3. The Cultural Overhaul	High	Creates a self-sufficient, scalable support organization and fixes the root cause.