L2 support feeling burnt out and undervalued - what would you do?
Looking for some outside perspective from people who have been in similar situations.
(For context, I have around 3 YOE in tech)
I work as tier 2 support at an MSP. On paper I'm L2 but in practice I'm the sole SME for Veeam (our primary product), and function as the de facto L3 since we don't have one. My day to day includes sev 1 data loss incidents, vendor escalations, log analysis, DRaaS and BaaS support, vCloud Director administration, various networking stuffs (pfSense + NSX Edge troubleshooting/setup), M365 and Entra ID across hundreds of tenants via GDAP, PowerShell automation (mostly Veeam stuff), mentoring and training L1's, and Veeam tenant migrations. I hold my VMCE and an AZ-900 (so far - AWS + CCNA coming down the pipe).
We have no defined escalation process, weak triage enforcement, no defined scope between L1 and L2. L1's escalate without triaging, don't send first responses, and regularly pull me into ad hoc calls with them and/or customers. I have limited protected time for documentation or proactive work. 99% of work is reactive firefighting.
Despite this I'm held to the same quota for ticket closes per week metric as our L1's.
A few weeks ago I worked a 1AM to 4AM maintenance window voluntarily because no one else knew the tech well enough (I should not have done that). Worked my full shift the next day. When I asked for 3 hours flex time my team lead denied it, framed it as punishment for missing a prior maintenance window in the same ticket (which I admitted to him openly when discussing the ticket days prior), then immediately pivoted to asking why my ticket closes were down. His recommendation to fix my metrics was to take L1 tickets to 'pad my stats'.
I brought process improvement recommendations to my team lead in a 1 on 1, a queue dispatcher role, defined L1/L2 scope, triage enforcement, escalation checklist. All dismissed. None passed on to my manager.
When I finally got a 1 on 1 with my manager, I had asked if they were aware of what I had discussed with my team lead - only to be told that my team lead said they and I had a productive discussion. My manager is reasonable but every concern I raised (metrics expectations + ideas for process improvement) was met with either "that's just how it is at the moment" or future promises that are supposed to fix everything. Their concrete advice was to take on more tickets. They acknowledged my cases were complex and heavier than the L1's, but the answer was still "do more."
I've been running like this since the new year. I'm feeling burnt out, a little disillusioned, and I feel I'm significantly underpaid for what I actually do.
I'm not set on leaving, I've been here for over a year, I like the company and I'm positioning myself for an internal move to a more project heavy role. But I'm curious what others in MSP or IT support would do in this situation. Have you been here? What did you do? Did it get better or did you leave?
TIA