Gett Global Technical support team — the Gatekeepers of the system
Gett is a global operation driving scores of passengers daily around 3 geographical regions and providing service to hundreds of thousands of end users.
Did you ever stop to ask yourself what makes this great operation tick?
Besides the amazingly talented R&D engineers that write the code and the fearless operators who handle the customers daily requests, there‘s a team of escalation engineers who tackle the not-so-usual issues, and who make sure Gett operation remains up and running.
These are the Global Technical Support team members, affectionately dubbed “Tech Heroes”.
In the following blog, I’ll share with you a “day in the life” of a Global Technical Support team member and show you what it takes to keep Gett’s operation alive and kicking.
Hint —It’s slightly more complicated than the image below… :-)
End users complaints
The majority of the tech support team is comprised of solving escalated support tickets for riders and drivers who encounter issues in their day-to-day usage of the Gett Mobile App. These may include application operation queries, finance related questions, for both drivers and riders, on their respective applications.
This support is also directed at more than 1000 Gett employees as Tier 1, 2 and sometimes Tier 3 support for production environment related issues.
The team works with a dedicated ticketing system that enables monitoring the SLAs per each ticket’s priority, producing detailed analysis on tickets types and enabling the team to improve on specific domains.
Production system tweaks
Another important aspect of the team’s responsibility is implementing change requests. Gett’s backend services work in a Micro Services architecture, and as such are controlled by a myriad of system settings per feature. As guardians of the production system, it is the tech support team’s responsibility to modify any required system setting to a given value and verify that this change was successful. Change requests are usually sent from Product managers or local operation managers.
This role requires an ability to deep dive into every feature or service specification, capabilities and restrictions so that it will be possible to:
- Manage and test every change from end to end.
- Gain a systematic view to understand the potential impact on other services once implemented.
It also requires strong communication skills, understanding the business side of every change along with strong monitoring knowledge to be able to react fast in case of any problem
Production E2E quality
Global tech support is all about the quality of the production system. This includes running sanity tests on the system periodically, discovering bugs in production, recreating bugs in production (which can’t be tested in staging systems) and making sure these are resolved as soon as possible.
System Monitoring
“Knowledge is Power” — This is a constant in life (well, other than death and taxes… 😇) and as seekers of knowledge, the tech support team employs a number of APM tools, which I’ve covered in my previous blog post, to always be aware of what’s going on with the production system. Be it Grafana to monitor specific scenarios, New Relic for system services health or DataDog for infrastructure components health, tech support agents “sleep with one eye opened” all the time, constantly watching the system.
Application version management
End users deal with the mobile (or web) application, and this area is also under the care of the tech support team. Each mobile version is uploaded to the relevant store (Google Play Store / Apple App Store) through a controlled process that requires the at most care. This is done both for the Driver App and for the Rider App.
Incident Management
As with every production system, the Gett system is not error-free and for that, Gett employs an organised incident management process to handle these unexpected faults.
For a full description on the Incident management process at Gett, you can follow our previous post about our Incident Resolution process.
Other than that, the Global tech support team members are part-time PMOs, Part time DBAs, Part time Dev Ops, Part time Psychologists and Full time “Directors of getting things done”.
We are the “Tech Heroes” — Hear us roar :-)
