IT Monitoring & Observability Engineer Job Jackson area,Michigan USA,IT/Tech

Job Title

IT Monitoring & Observability Engineer

Location

Jackson, MI 49201

Mode

Contract Onsite

Position Summary

We are seeking an IT Monitoring / Full-Stack Observability Engineer to design, implement, and operate enterprise monitoring solutions across on-premises infrastructure and Microsoft Azure cloud environments. This role will be responsible for delivering end-to-end observability covering infrastructure, applications, services, logs, metrics, traces, and alerting with a primary focus on Solar Winds (self-hosted) for on-prem monitoring and Azure Monitor for cloud monitoring.

The ideal candidate has strong technical depth in monitoring architecture, alert strategy, dashboarding, and operational response, and can partner with infrastructure, application, and security teams to ensure high availability and performance.

Key Responsibilities

Monitoring / Observability Platform Ownership
- Own and enhance enterprise monitoring using:
- Define and maintain standards for instrumentation, telemetry collection, alerting, and dashboards across hybrid environments.
On-Prem Monitoring (Solar Winds)
- Administer and optimize Solar Winds platform components (e.g., Orion modules where applicable).
- Configure monitoring for:
- Build actionable alerts with escalation policies, suppress ions, dependencies, and maintenance windows.
- Troubleshoot polling, credentialing, discovery, and performance issues for Solar Winds services and SQL back‑end (as needed).
Azure Monitoring (Azure Monitor / Log Analytics / Application Insights)
- Implement Azure‑native monitoring strategy using:
- Workbooks for visualization and reporting.
- Create and maintain KQL queries for logs/insights and operational analytics.
- Establish alert rules for Azure resources (VMs, AKS, App Services, Functions, SQL, Storage, networking, etc.).
Full‑Stack Observability Practices
- Drive adoption of observability best practices:
- Ensure dashboards tell an operational story (health, performance, capacity, and trends).
- Support incident response by correlating signals across on‑prem + cloud.
Automation, Integration & ITSM
- Automate monitoring configuration and reporting through scripting (Power Shell, Python) and IaC (Terraform/Bicep as appropriate).
- Integrate monitoring alerts with ITSM tools (e.g., Service Now/Jira/Remedy) and collaboration channels (Teams/Email).
- Support continuous improvement through post‑incident reviews and monitoring enhancements.
Documentation & Governance
- Maintain runbooks, SOPs, monitoring standards, and service maps.
- Ensure monitoring adheres to security and compliance requirements (access controls, logging retention, least privilege).

Required Qualifications

8+ years experience in IT monitoring / observability / infrastructure operations in enterprise environments.
Hands‑on experience with Solar Winds (Self‑Hosted) administration and monitoring configuration.
Hands‑on experience with Azure Monitor including Log Analytics, alerts, and workbooks.
Strong working knowledge of Windows Server and Linux fundamentals.
Networking concepts (TCP/IP, DNS, routing, SNMP, firewalls).
Monitoring protocols and methods (SNMP, WMI, agents, APIs, syslog).
Experience building dashboards, defining alert thresholds, tuning signals, and reducing noise.
Proficiency with KQL (Kusto Query Language) for Log Analytics queries.
Strong troubleshooting and root‑cause analysis skills across hybrid systems.
Ability to work in on‑call/after‑hours rotations (as applicable).

Preferred / Nice‑to‑Have Skills

Solar Winds module experience (as applicable): NPM, SAM, NCM, VMAN, Net Flow, etc.
Azure services monitoring experience: AKS, App Service, Functions, SQL MI/DB, Key Vault, Storage, Front…