Production support
Keeping live systems running: diagnosing failures, fixing what broke, and getting the service back.
Also written application support, L2 support
Production support is the team that responds when something in the live environment goes wrong. A batch job abends, a transaction starts failing, a file arrives corrupted, a report does not balance. This is who picks it up.
The work is diagnostic. Read what the system reported, find the failing step or transaction, work out what actually happened, decide whether the fix is a rerun, a data correction or a code change, and get the service back inside whatever time the business allows. Overnight failures often carry hard deadlines, because the batch window does not move.
It demands broad knowledge rather than deep specialism. You need enough COBOL to read a program, enough JCL to understand a job, enough SQL to inspect data, and enough of the platform to interpret the messages, plus knowledge of the business, so you can judge what a wrong figure means.
It is often where people learn a system fastest. Nothing teaches you how an application really works like fixing it under pressure.
Related terms
- AbendAn abnormal end: a program stopping in an uncontrolled way rather than finishing and reporting a result.
- Return codeA number a program leaves behind saying how it went. Zero for clean, higher numbers for warnings and failures.
- SDSFThe tool for looking at what jobs are running, what has finished, and what output they produced.
- Batch windowThe period, usually overnight, in which batch work has to finish before the business needs the systems back.
- Mainframe application developerThe person who writes and changes the business programs: COBOL, JCL, SQL and the logic that runs the organisation.
- OperatorThe person who watches the running systems, responds to messages, and starts, stops and recovers work.