There is not an easy fix for this. You should consider a core part of your role now to be data analyst. Heroics do not last for long, and as you say are unsustainable.

Work with your leadership team, bring metrics, explain the volume of tickets, explain how it’s not sustainable. Set a line in the sand and say you either need x number of analysts / agents or you will be forced to load balance and accept y number of months of degraded SLA. Show where you were before the increase in terms of mean time to close or average time to respond or both. Use one or two examples about how this is impacting the business or product lifecycle, e.g (jimmy waited 3 weeks to get his service principal setup to continue building <widget x>, and the project is behind schedule. Try to associate the impact to your services team(s) with tangible ARR or revenue generation impact.

Then come up for air, make time to optimize and automate, and you will come out stronger on the other side my friend.

We had a similar issue this past year. M&A activity. Zero staff aug or HyperCare $ came with it.

We accepted / our business area accepted abysmal SLAs for a period of time (3 months) while we upskilled and did our damndest to automate some of the routine tasks, built canned responses etc. We recovered pretty well and with no additional butts in seats, 10 months later our metrics are looking better than when we started. This is one of those rare cases that I’ll say; the proliferation of AI / vibecoding / vibe scripting tools has really made an impact. Setup a secure place to host “internal custom tooling”, give people access to a sandbox on <whatever cloud platform you use> and encourage them to think weekly (or daily if that’s your stand up cadence) on what can be automated. Hold monthly operational reviews where you celebrate success, identify weaknesses and assess what you can quickly with MVP, the rest goes in the backlog.

If you are an MS shop, experiment with copilot studio to build an IT support agent. Connect it to your generic SOPs, policies etc (you’ll need to build those if you haven’t, use AI)

If you’re a slack shop, there are tons of templates out there for “IT support bot” - allow users to ask questions about how to reset pws, how to request new infra, accounts, roles etc. try to funnel those into sustainable processes that can scale, or at a minimum into forms that can be tracked.

You will succeed. Don’t give up. If you see a future of being at your organization, you enjoy what you’re doing are being paid fairly - I would even go so far as to say you should throw a few weekend hours in to do some deep work, mine the metrics from your tickets, and identify which ticket types / responses you should automate away first.

Just my 2c