Wireshark
I spend my Wednesday the second week with Renaud. He’s working in the tech team for the 2nd level customer support, meaning he’s focussed on resolving issues people have with the SIM card, without actually communicating with the customer in the first place – instead, that’s what the 1st level does. Most of the time, that’s the process of how complaints get handled:
- Customer to 1st level support
- If 1st level can’t solve the issue, they hand it to 2nd level
- 2nd level tries to solve the issue
- If solved, 2nd level passes it down to 1st level
- 1st-level answers to customer
Renaud also told me a lot about Wireshark, the main tool used to analyze network traces. Wireshark is an amazing tool that lets us see what’s happening in the 1NCE network. By analyzing the traffic between devices, Wireshark helps troubleshooting and monitor performance – you can then filter, sort, and visualize the data in different ways 🙂
Core Network at MVNO
On Thursday, I got a detailed introduction to 1NCE’s Main Core operations by joining Juris. He gave Edgars (a new team member) and me a technical introduction to the main core operations and how IT elements get monitored at 1NCE. I also got the opportunity to see how Grafana works, an Open-Sourse data visualization tool by aws for creating live-metrics dashboards with data from different pods and containers collected by f.ex. the Prometheus servers.
All of this is a super-complicated process – here’s my brief take on Juris’s explanation about CM:
- A GTP Proxy creates a tunnel between the 1NCE network and the customer’s device – this runs on a virtual machine.
- We also use Cm Peer, which is a Kubernetes service that allows us to scale up or down the Kubernetes pods according to the current demand. A node can have multiple pods, each with a different function or application – and each node has a node-exporter that communicates with the Prometheus server.
- Let’s say the most important pod is the Prometheus pod – it collects data from all the other pods to process it and forward it for two things: 1) Alerts and 2) the Grafana Dashboards mentioned above. Alerts are notifications that send messages if any issues arise. There are 3 levels of alerts – slack messages, calls during work hours, and 24h calls.
Recruitment
On my very last day, I got into the office at 10 am., to join a teams-meeting with Javgenia, who told me about the HR process at 1NCE Latvia. They use lots of different tools, mainly LinkedIn, to reach out to potential future employees – or often called talents. Later on, Jekaterina, part of the new training and development center and former HR manager introduced me to this new training and development center – a place for people at 1NCE to gain new knowledge (both technical and inspirational, f.ex. about tips on how to stay focussed longer, including a big book library and a collection of online training from peers). We also explored the LinkedIn Recruiter software with advanced search filters for HR – didn’t know that thing even existed! Super interesting 🙂