AJAY KOTNALA

Project Planning and Execution.

• Led cross-functional support initiatives from planning through execution, including timelines, milestones, and risk management.
• Scoped and delivered support process improvement projects that reduced resolution time.
• Collaborate with Product, Engineering, and Customer Success teams to align support initiatives with business goals.
• Act as a liaison between support and technical teams during project rollouts or system migrations.
• Training support members on new processes and tools to ensure smooth transitions, with minimal service disruption.
• Handled support readiness for new product launches.
• Managed vendor relationships during third-party tool integrations.

Process Improvement and SOPs.

• Introduced best practices for knowledge management, contributing to a self-service deflection rate of 20%.
• Identified recurring issues and initiated root cause analysis to prevent future occurrences.

Technical Expertise.

• Provided in-depth technical support for the Egencia web-based application. Including troubleshooting network and application-related issues.
• Assisted in diagnosing and resolving complex issues related to APIs, cloud infrastructure, integrations, and platform reliability.
  Used tools such as Salesforce, Jira, ServiceNow, Kibana, and Datadog to manage and resolve support cases.

Metrics and Reporting.

• Defined and tracked project KPIs (e.g., CSA, backlog reduction) to evaluate success and continuously improve.

Agile/Scrum Practices

• Led or participated in daily stand-ups, sprint planning, and retrospectives to manage project progress and team alignment.
  • Used Jira, Trello, and Asana to track support project tasks and dependencies.

Application Support.

• Provide support for web-based Java applications (Egencia). Debugging web services and APIs for air, hotel, car, and rail booking platforms.
• Provided support and troubleshooting expertise for microservices-based applications running in production environments.
• Implemented monitoring and alerting solutions to detect and respond to performance anomalies and service disruptions.
• Diagnosed and resolved issues related to application functionality, performance, and integration.
• Collaborating with development teams to identify and implement solutions for recurring problems.
  Conducted root cause analysis to prevent future incidents and improve application stability.
• Design and develop application support monitoring, dashboards, alerts, automation, and self-service solutions using Datagog and Kibana.
• Resolve incidents, issues, and root cause analyses in support of production and pre-production.
• Troubleshooting for issues at the functional level, as well as in GDS (Amadeus) systems, APIs, and at the UX level. Skilled in analyzing logs, stack traces, and error messages to diagnose issues and identify root causes.
• Ensuring all customer sites are up and running by utilizing proactive monitoring tools. This increased customer uptime to 95%.
• Bug management involves opening relevant bugs with an appropriate level of technical information and prioritization to yield bug fixes.

Incident Management.

• Extensive knowledge of incident management processes, including incident detection, triage, resolution, and post-incident analysis.
  Experience with incident management tools such as ServiceNow, JIRA Service Desk, and Remedy.
• Ability to prioritize and manage multiple incidents simultaneously, with a focus on delivering timely resolutions and minimizing downtime.
• Receive and triage incident reports, ensuring accurate classification, prioritization, and assignment to appropriate resolver groups.
• Coordinate and facilitate incident bridges, leading cross-functional teams in diagnosing and resolving incidents according to defined SLAs. Communicate incident status updates, impact assessments, and resolution plans to stakeholders at all levels, including executives, IT teams, and business units.

Product Management.

• Participate in triage with product teams, as well as business teams. Analyse data from the incident management system, and understand trends, patterns, and act on them.
• Defined product requirements, user stories, and acceptance criteria, collaborating with cross-functional teams in Agile environments.
• Other responsibilities also include overseeing the flow of information from internal customers all the way to product development teams and ensuring high-impact issues are addressed in a timely manner with agility. Understand the features and changes in product requirements, and support the sprint planning.
• Gain a deep understanding of users and customers, identify and fill product gaps, and generate new ideas that improve user experience.

Production Support

• · Provide Support for web-based Java application (Egencia). Debugging Web services & API's
• Provided support and troubleshooting expertise for microservices-based applications running in production environments.
• Implemented monitoring and alerting solutions to detect and respond to performance anomalies and service disruptions.
• Diagnosed and resolved issues related to application functionality, performance, and integration.
• Collaborated with development teams to identify and implement solutions for recurring problems.
• Conducted root cause analysis to prevent future incidents and improve application stability.
• Responsible for environment stability, development analysis, and troubleshooting for production/ UAT defects and quick resolution.
• Production defects analysis, implementation & infrastructure support.
• Automate and optimize system processes. Design/develop application support monitoring, Dashboards, alerts, automation, and self-service solutions.
• Resolve Incidents / Issues/ Root cause analyses in support of production, pre-production.
• Troubleshooting for issues at functional level as well as in GDS systems, APIs as well as UX level.
• Perform application disaster recovery testing, ensuring business readiness following failover.
• Ensuring all customer sites are up and running by utilizing proactive monitoring tools. This increased customer up time to 95%.
• Monitoring Web, Application, and Database servers for abnormality.
• Datadog for monitoring performance of different services.

Incident Management

• Extensive knowledge of incident management processes, including incident detection, triage, resolution, and post-incident analysis.
• Experience with incident management tools such as ServiceNow, JIRA Service Desk, and Remedy.
• Ability to prioritize and manage multiple incidents simultaneously, with focus on delivering timely resolutions and minimizing downtime.
• Excellent problem-solving and analytical skills, with commitment to continuous improvement and proactive incident prevention.
• Receive and triaged incident reports, ensuring accurate classification, prioritization, and assignment to appropriate resolver groups.
• Coordinate and facilitated incident bridges, leading cross-functional teams in diagnosing and resolving incidents according to defined SLAs.
• Communicate incident status updates, impact assessments, and resolution plans to stakeholders at all levels, including executives, IT teams, and business units.
• Conducted post-incident reviews and root cause analysis to identify contributing factors and implement corrective actions to prevent recurrence
• Initiating bridge calls for code red production incidents with all internal stakeholders and driving it to resolution.

Application Support

• Debugging application logs for root cause and bug identification. Provide second-level application software support for multiple products.
• Analyze system errors and troubleshoot network, server, and database errors. Document system bugs, Story, Epics and report to Development team.
• Skilled in analyzing logs, stack traces, and error messages to diagnose issues and identify root causes.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to understand customer-reported issues and reproduce them in development environments.
• Bug management by opening relevant bugs with appropriate level of technical information and prioritization to yield bug fixes.
• Collaborate with development teams to prioritize and resolve bugs, providing detailed bug reports and test cases as needed.
• Handling issues related to SSO, oAuth2.0.
• Handled and assisted in resolution of high-priority Production issues by reviewing large server logs and application code.

Product Management

• Participate in triage with product teams as well as business teams.
• Analyze data from incident management system and understand trends, patterns and act on them.
• Defined product requirements, user stories, and acceptance criteria, collaborating with cross-functional teams in Agile environments.
• Participated in sprint planning, backlog grooming, and daily stand-up meetings to track progress and address impediments.
• Increased knowledge and allowed for quicker turnaround on incoming requests by providing process and procedure documentation for colleagues and business users for software applications being supported, which led to better understanding of application and functionality.
• Other responsibility also includes overseeing flow of information from internal customers all way to product development teams and ensuring high impact issues are addressed in timely manner with agility
• Understand feature and changes in product requirements & support sprint planning.
• Gain deep understanding of users and customers, identify and fill product gaps and generate new Ideas that improve user experience.

Specialties:

· Strategic Planning. Requirement Gathering.

· Life Cycle Support and Business continuity plans

· Hands on experience in IBM WebSphere MQ,7 &7.5 (ADMIN role) Oracle 10g/9i.

· Change Management.

· Incident Management.

· Disaster Recovery..

· Business Continuity Programs

Application & Production Support:

• Experience in supporting Web Based & Windows application which Involves following technology JAVA, .NET, PL/SQL.
• Supporting Oracle database (Replication monitoring, Triggers, Data re-trigger, Tablespace Issues, Performance Issues).
• Supporting application running on windows 2008.
• Application deployment on new win2008 servers.
• As effort for process Improvement developed applications that generate user-based reports through web. (.Net framework (ASP) & Oracle 10g).
• Batch scheduling & monitoring scripts developed in VBScript.
• Deploying and testing connectivity standard across platforms with CAIL / Windows, CAIL / Plus (ActiveX), CAIL /Java & CAIL Session Manager for access to Tandem, IBM and DEC systems (via CAIL or Attachmate) for desktops.
• Providing post deployment support for upgrades/changes/enhancements done on production (Live) Environment.
• Working effectively with customers and other IT teams within organization to ensure requests and/or issues are understood and directed to correct teams for effective action.
• Conducting quarterly disaster recovery test of various applications.
• Integration testing and performance testing of application.
• Creating and maintaining High Availability Servers.
• Incident Management using tool like BMC remedy.
• Provide support out of office hours, during weekends and during major release work to development and customer to help them resolve issues faced.
• On call support and ad-hoc overtime

Application & Production Support

• Application staging.
• Maintained the documents and create reports for the business analysts and end-users.
• Work with business stakeholders, application developers, and production teams and across functional units to identify business needs and discuss solution options.
• Providing Level 2 support for Citi Bank major applications.
• Regular patch updations.
• Working on Sql packages and monitoring.
• Setting up and supporting customer connectivity using MQ channels.
• Monitoring jobs in Autosys Tools.
• Ensured team stayed up to date on business continuity plans and resources scheduled DR and power down tests.
• Provide technical analysis, debugging and problem solving.
• Analyze application data to assess performance and uncover problems.
• Work in team environment to complete all testing activities according to schedule.
• Coordinate bug & Incident resolutions with development team and project managers.

Application Support

• ·Responsibilities implementing database objects (Procedures, functions, triggers) ⬧Writing\Updating Sproc, Triggers as requirement.
• Worked on SQL Data Transformation Services.
• Application Deployment on production servers.
• Web based application Support.
• Maintained documents and create reports for business analysts and end-users.
• Work with business stakeholders, application developers, and production teams and across functional units to identify business needs and discuss solution options.
• Experience in working with Oracle Applications and Siebel Apps.

Development

• Developed Web based Application and Web pages using .NET framework 2.0 & 3.5.
• Tools used Visual Studio 2005 for Dot Net based applications.
• Usage of HTML, JavaScript, XML, CSS for web page designing.
• Database Used SQL SERVER 2000 & 2005