Operational Analytics Lead – Splunk & Observability

8+ YEARS EXPERIENCE | SPLUNK ENTERPRISE | DYNATRACE | KPI/OKR GOVERNANCE | IT OPERATIONS

Location: Albany, NY – Candidates must reside within driving distance
Work Arrangement: Hybrid – Onsite 2 days per week and every other Friday
Employment Type: W2 Contract Only
Industry: Government Technology / Healthcare IT / Enterprise IT Operations
Experience: 8+ Years

IMPORTANT ENGAGEMENT REQUIREMENTS.

• Candidates must reside within driving distance of Albany, NY.

• Must be available to work onsite 2 days per week and every other Friday

MUST-HAVE TECHNICAL EXPERIENCE

We are looking for candidates with strong hands-on experience in the following areas:

• Splunk Enterprise: SPL searches, dashboards, alerts, log ingestion, field extraction, data normalization, and operational reporting.

• Dynatrace & Observability: Application performance monitoring, distributed tracing, infrastructure visibility, service-flow analysis, and anomaly detection.

• KPI/OKR Governance: Defining, collecting, validating, analyzing, and reporting operational metrics, SLAs, and SLOs.

• DevOps Issue & Defect Management: Incident triage, defect prioritization, backlog and aging management, cross-team escalation, release coordination, and resolution tracking.

• Operational Analytics: Power BI, Excel, dashboards, scorecards, and leadership reporting.

• Systems & Application Support: Linux/Unix, Windows, JBoss, MuleSoft, and enterprise application integrations.

• Scripting & Automation: Python, Shell/Bash, PowerShell, Java, and REST APIs.

Candidates should be comfortable working across Development, QA, Infrastructure, Security, and Operations teams.

PROJECT OVERVIEW

The Sims Agency is seeking an experienced Operational Analytics Lead to oversee operational analytics, observability, systems administration coordination, and KPI/OKR governance across enterprise applications and technology services.

The selected consultant will lead the collection, validation, analysis, and reporting of operational metrics while utilizing tools such as Splunk and Dynatrace to improve visibility into application health, infrastructure performance, service reliability, and business outcomes.

This position requires close collaboration with application, infrastructure, development, security, and business teams to identify operational issues, support root-cause analysis, improve operational processes, and transition recurring metrics and reporting activities to the Operations team.

The ideal candidate combines hands-on Splunk analytics and observability expertise with IT operations knowledge, performance monitoring, technical project coordination, and operational governance experience.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

1. KPI/OKR Metrics Collection & Governance

• Define and maintain KPI/OKR metrics, targets, ownership, data sources, reporting schedules, and validation controls.

• Consolidate operational performance data and communicate results against established objectives.

• Maintain governance over metric accuracy, consistency, and reporting cadence.

2. Splunk Analytics & Log Management

• Develop and optimize SPL searches, dashboards, reports, alerts, and scheduled reports.

• Analyze application, system, security, and integration logs.

• Monitor HTTP status codes, errors, transaction failures, ingestion trends, and recurring patterns.

• Convert log analysis findings into actionable operational insights.

3. Observability & Performance Monitoring

• Support application performance monitoring, distributed tracing, service-flow analysis, and infrastructure visibility.

• Identify anomalies and correlate performance indicators with logs and events.

• Help isolate service degradation and accelerate root-cause analysis.

• Improve monitoring coverage and service visibility.

4. Operational Analytics & Visualization

• Develop operational dashboards, scorecards, and reports using Power BI, Splunk, and Excel.

• Monitor availability, latency, error rates, incident trends, SLA/SLO performance, capacity, workload, and automation outcomes.

• Present operational performance and trends to technical teams and leadership.

5. Systems & Application Administration

• Coordinate administration and support of Linux/Unix and Windows environments, application servers, middleware, and integration platforms.

• Support JBoss, MuleSoft, Twilio integrations, service configuration, access permissions, certificates, scheduled jobs, deployments, and patching coordination.

• Perform capacity monitoring and environment health checks.

6. Scripting & Operational Automation

• Use Shell/Bash, Python, Java, and API-based integrations to automate operational activities.

• Automate data collection, log processing, recurring reports, health checks, alert enrichment, and routine operational tasks.

• Identify opportunities to reduce manual reporting and repetitive processes.

7. Incident, Problem & Root-Cause Management

• Partner with application and infrastructure teams to investigate incidents and correlate logs and metrics.

• Identify root causes and document corrective actions.

• Track recurring issues through resolution and support incident, problem, and change-management processes.

8. Monitoring, Alerting & Service Reliability

• Review monitoring coverage, alert thresholds, dashboards, and escalation procedures.

• Reduce noisy or duplicate alerts and improve monitoring accuracy.

• Support service availability, resilience, and operational readiness.

9. Stakeholder Coordination & Project Management

• Manage project milestones, dependencies, risks, action items, and reporting commitments.

• Coordinate with business owners, engineering teams, application support, and leadership.

• Establish accountability and communicate operational performance.

10. DevOps Issue & Defect Management

• Coordinate production issues, application defects, incident investigations, and remediation across Development, QA, Infrastructure, and Operations.

• Monitor SLA commitments and identify recurring problems.

• Track corrective and preventive actions.

• Provide status updates to technical teams and leadership.

11. Operations Transition & Knowledge Transfer

• Develop runbooks, standard operating procedures, support matrices, metric inventories, escalation procedures, and training materials.

• Lead knowledge-transfer sessions.

• Coordinate the formal handover of KPI/OKR collection, dashboards, and recurring operational processes to the Operations team.

12. Continuous Improvement

• Identify opportunities to improve observability, data quality, process consistency, automation, system reliability, and operational efficiency.

• Measure improvement outcomes through defined KPIs and OKRs.

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS

• 8+ years of related professional experience.

• Background in IT operations, systems or application administration, operational analytics, technical project coordination, or enterprise technology environments.

• Proven experience defining, collecting, validating, analyzing, and reporting KPIs, OKRs, SLAs, or SLOs.

• Hands-on experience with log analysis, monitoring, alerting, troubleshooting, and root-cause analysis.

• Strong hands-on experience with Splunk Enterprise, including SPL, dashboards, alerts, log ingestion, field extraction, and data normalization.

• Experience managing DevOps issue and defect lifecycles, including triage, prioritization, backlog and aging management, cross-team escalation, release coordination, and resolution reporting.

• Ability to develop operational reports, dashboards, scorecards, and leadership updates.

• Strong understanding of incident tracking, problem management, change coordination, documentation, and operational handover.

• Experience with performance monitoring, distributed tracing, infrastructure monitoring, service-flow analysis, and anomaly detection.

• Familiarity with Prometheus, Grafana, AppDynamics, Elastic/ELK, or OpenTelemetry.

• Experience administering or supporting Linux/Unix and Windows systems, application servers, middleware, and enterprise integrations.

• Knowledge of JBoss, MuleSoft, REST APIs, JSON, SFTP, and Twilio or similar communications/integration services.

• Experience with scripting and automation using Shell/Bash, Python, PowerShell, Java, or REST APIs.

• Familiarity with IT service management and workflow tools such as ServiceNow and Jira.

• Experience with Power BI and Excel.

• Understanding of networking and application fundamentals, including DNS, TLS/certificates, HTTP/HTTPS, ports, authentication, access control, and service dependencies.

• Experience preparing runbooks, operational readiness checklists, support models, knowledge-transfer materials, and service transition plans.

TECHNICAL SKILLS

Monitoring & Observability: Splunk Enterprise, SPL, Dynatrace, Prometheus, Grafana, AppDynamics, Elastic/ELK, OpenTelemetry.

Analytics & Reporting: Power BI, Microsoft Excel, Operational Dashboards, KPI/OKR Reporting, SLA/SLO Monitoring.

Systems & Middleware: Linux, Unix, Windows, JBoss, MuleSoft, Application Servers, Enterprise Integrations.

Programming & Automation: Python, Shell/Bash, PowerShell, Java, REST APIs.

Integration Technologies: REST APIs, JSON, SFTP, Twilio, DNS, TLS/SSL, HTTP/HTTPS.

ITSM & DevOps: ServiceNow, Jira, Incident Management, Problem Management, Defect Management, Change Management, Release Coordination.

Performance & Reliability: Application Performance Monitoring, Infrastructure Monitoring, Distributed Tracing, Log Analysis, Alert Management, Root-Cause Analysis.

PROFESSIONAL SKILLS

• Strong stakeholder management and cross-functional coordination.

• Excellent verbal and written communication.

• Analytical thinking and problem-solving.

• Project coordination and prioritization.

• Ability to communicate technical findings to leadership.

• Ownership and accountability for operational deliverables.

• Process improvement and attention to detail.

• Knowledge transfer and documentation skills.

EXPECTED PROJECT DELIVERABLES

The selected consultant will be responsible for delivering:

1. KPI/OKR Governance Inventory: Documented metric definitions, owners, targets, data sources, and reporting cadence.

2. Monitoring & Analytics Dashboards: Splunk and/or Dynatrace dashboards, searches, alerts, and operational reports aligned with service requirements.

3. Operational Performance Analysis: Log and performance analysis identifying error patterns, service degradation, capacity concerns, and actionable remediation.

4. Operational Documentation: Documented health checks, support procedures, escalation paths, and incident/problem follow-up actions.

5. Automation Solutions: Scripts and automation opportunities that reduce manual data collection and recurring reporting efforts.

6. Issue & Defect Management Framework: Severity definitions, ownership, escalation paths, SLA tracking, aging reports, root-cause follow-up, and closure criteria.

7. Operations Transition Package: Dashboards, metric collection processes, SOPs/runbooks, training, ownership, and formal handover sign-off.

IDEAL CANDIDATE PROFILE

The strongest candidates will have a combination of:

• Hands-on Splunk Enterprise and SPL development experience.

• Dynatrace or equivalent observability platform experience.

• Strong IT Operations and application monitoring background.

• Experience establishing and governing operational KPIs, OKRs, SLAs, and SLOs.

• Experience coordinating DevOps defects, production incidents, and cross-functional remediation.

• Strong reporting, automation, and operational process improvement capabilities.

• Experience transitioning operational reporting and monitoring responsibilities to support teams.

Candidates with a combination of Splunk engineering, observability, IT operations analytics, and operational governance experience are strongly encouraged to apply.