Nikolas Armendariz

Observability & technical-support leadership — turning escalation friction into automated, repeatable, streamlined delivery.

Minneapolis, MN ● ⭐ Connect on LinkedIn

Who is this guy?

A Customer-focused observability leader with 16 years across SignalFx, Splunk and Cisco, including technical leadership of Splunk Observability's AMER consulting engineering team. Analyzed high-visibility escalations, found a significant portion were avoidable and built tooling and outlined pathways to resolve them at the source — improving documentation, onboarding and overall delivery consistency. Deep expertise in observability platforms (Splunk, OpenTelemetry), cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, Azure) and enterprise-scale support delivery, pairing hands-on technical depth with a consultative approach that accelerates customer outcomes and retention. This same approach also directly benefited the support team — reducing reactive burnout, deepening technical learning and building on each engineer's individual strengths.

What is he good at?

Training & Onboarding High Viz Migration Consultation Enterprise Escalation Management Observability & APM (Splunk, OpenTelemetry) Automation & Tooling Team Leadership & Mentoring Cloud Platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) Root Cause Analysis Technical Account Collaboration Customer Success & Retention SaaS Environments Customer Advocacy

Professional Experience

Observability Support Technical Team Lead Jan 2023 – Jul 2026

Cisco (Splunk) · Remote — Minneapolis, MN

A Technical Leader for a 7–10 person AMER consulting team (and ~22 engineers globally in a matrixed capacity) delivering Tier 2/3 support for Splunk Observability Cloud across ~1,200 enterprise accounts, sustaining 90%+ customer satisfaction.
Analyzed 750 critical sustaining-engineering escalations and found that over half stemmed from avoidable, automatable root causes — the foundation for a prevention-first delivery model targeting the highest-volume failure patterns instead of resolving tickets one at a time.
Designed, built and tested a cross-platform Layer 0–5 diagnostic framework that automates root-cause triage across ingestion, configuration and pipeline failures — built to standardize and accelerate fault isolation across the team.
Developed migration and onboarding playbooks to guide customers through complex platform cutovers — covering config source-of-truth verification and data ingestion to ensure a clean transition before cutover.
Served as senior technical escalation lead on enterprise accounts, working directly with customer engineering and operations teams — including senior technical stakeholders — to resolve high-stakes, time-critical production issues spanning APM tracing, log collection, OpenTelemetry instrumentation and cloud-streaming architectures.
Ran architectural and root-cause reviews with internal engineering leadership up to Director level, coordinating cross-functional response across support and engineering during critical incidents.
Partnered with Product and Engineering to translate recurring customer pain points into feature requests and bug prioritization, directly influencing roadmap decisions.
Mentored support engineers on technical depth and customer communication, developing several into senior-level roles; recognized company-wide as a "Disruptor of the Industry" (2024) for raising team standards and championing a customer-first culture.

Senior Technical Support Engineer Mar 2019 – Jan 2023

Splunk (acquired by Cisco) · Remote — Minneapolis, MN

Owned end-to-end resolution of complex technical cases for enterprise customers across Splunk's Observability and APM product suite, consistently exceeding SLA targets.
Acted as a customer advocate internally, bridging communication between customers and product/engineering teams during critical incidents and feature gaps.
Developed technical documentation and runbooks that reduced mean time to resolution (MTTR) for recurring issue categories.
Delivered technical enablement sessions on best practices for OpenTelemetry adoption, APM tracing configuration and cloud integration patterns.

Technical Support Engineer Apr 2017 – Mar 2019

SignalFx (acquired by Splunk) · Bloomington, MN

Provided frontline technical support for SignalFx's real-time monitoring and analytics platform, onboarding new enterprise customers and driving initial product adoption.
Troubleshot integrations across AWS, GCP and Azure environments, helping customers optimize their observability stack for performance and cost.
Contributed to internal knowledge base and customer-facing documentation, reducing repeat inquiries and improving self-service resolution rates.

Technical Support Engineer Jun 2012 – Apr 2017

EMC / Isilon (now Dell) · Plymouth, MN

Delivered expert-level support for Isilon OneFS clustered storage systems across a global enterprise customer base, handling complex filesystem, networking and performance issues.
Earned 4 Bronze, 1 Silver and 1 Gold award for exceptional customer support performance and converting skeptical customers into long-term advocates.
Collaborated with pre- and post-development engineering teams to reproduce and resolve customer-reported defects in test environments.
Mentored junior engineers on advanced troubleshooting methodologies including packet-capture analysis and SMB permission resolution.

Helpdesk Specialist / Backup Specialist Oct 2010 – Apr 2012

Corporate Technologies, LLC · Eden Prairie, MN

Provided managed IT services for 700+ SMB clients, resolving 15+ tickets daily across Active Directory, Exchange, backup and endpoint security platforms.
Served as backup infrastructure specialist, auditing and recommending solutions to ensure data protection and disaster-recovery readiness.
Coordinated on-site escalations and third-party vendor support to meet client SLAs.

Technical Skills

Observability & Monitoring Splunk Observability Cloud, OpenTelemetry, APM Tracing, Log Collection, Real-Time Analytics

Cloud & Infrastructure AWS, GCP, Azure, Kubernetes / Containerized Environments, GitOps (ArgoCD, Helm, FluxCD), VMware (ESX/vSphere/vCenter)

Storage & Systems Isilon OneFS, Enterprise NAS, Linux (Ubuntu, SUSE, Mint), Windows Server, Active Directory

Languages & Tools Python, JavaScript, Java, Perl, Salesforce Service Cloud, Jira, Wireshark / Packet Analysis

Security & Forensics FTK, EnCase, Digital Forensics, Endpoint Protection, Backup & Disaster Recovery

Education

B.A.S., Computer Forensic Science May 2010

Metropolitan State University · St. Paul, MN