IT & Technical Support Guide to Helpdesk, Desktop & Servers

On this course, you will learn how the different levels of IT technical support work, some of the topics included on this course are as follows:

* Service Level Agreements (SLAs) - expected level of service availability

* Data Protection - how to ensure that data within your organisation is kept secure.

* Assessing User Ability when dealing with support requests as is unique from user to user

* How to ensure passwords are secure in a modern computing environment

* Ticket escalations and priority exceptions for issue troubleshooting

On the Level 3 section of the course, you'll find some insider tips, such as how to build useful contacts within your company when you're working at desktop support level. Although this is possible at any level, I've found this be easiest at level 2 as you are more likely to move around to fix issues.

The key element to providing quality technical support is to ensure that you keep your knowledge up-to-date, some of this can be achieved through additional experience, whilst you can also give this somewhat of a boost by gaining additional technical certifications, which can be especially useful in the early stages of your career within desktop support (level 2), as well as infrastructure and technical support (level 3).

You'll learn everything you need to know to be able to move up from 2nd line desktop support to 3rd line (server) infrastructure support. Note that this does assume knowledge of some basic IT fundamentals, which in most cases would have been gained whilst at 1st line technician level.

Whilst this will, of course, vary between different organisations, this is based on my own experiences of some of the key things that can go a long way to making that move, along with becoming as familiar as possible with your organisation's processes, I wish you all the best of success in your career.

* Brief introduction to the course and the contents

* Day in the life of an infrastructure technician

* An overview of hypervisors and their function

* Introduction to virtual switches - how they tie into hypervisors, etc

* Incident management fundamentals - managing incidents

* Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) and Recovery Time Objectives (RPOs)

* Escalation processes - when to escalate an issue to a higher level of the support process

* Threat monitoring - identifying threats

* REPADMIN and DCDIAG utility overview

* SYSVOL folder basics - replication overview

* Data protection fundamentals

* Backup types - incremental, differential, full and synthetic full

* SAN Storage Overview - basics of storage area networks

* Overview of the most common RAID levels used for backup purposes - RAID0, RAID1, RAID5 and RAID6