IT Operations has a wide spectrum of roles and responsibilities. The positions range from level 1 (L1) operators to Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) and everything in between. L1 operators, for example, are (often) almost exclusively reactive. They feed off the constant stream of incidents reported by clients and events that are reported by monitoring and alerting systems. This is in contrast to SREs, who work at the other end of the spectrum.
In the IT world, application service providers (ASPs) build customer trust by ensuring the continuous, uninterrupted availability of their services and software. Service availability allows customers to operate normally and generate revenue without being directly impacted by their providers’ system failures. Though providers work to ensure system uptime, they are often challenged by unexpected technical issues that impact customer-facing systems.