Overview of Network Operation Center: Best Practices & Challenges

The Network Operations Center or NOC is a central location where IT technicians directly support remote management and monitoring software (RMM) efforts. The NOC team is widely used in the field of managed IT services and is a great driver of the service for many managed service providers (MSP).

These technical teams carefully monitor the endpoints they monitor and manage, solve any problems that arise individually and take precautions to prevent many problems from occurring. The NOC team is also deeply involved in high-level security actions and disaster recovery and support (BDR) initiatives, ensuring 24/7 uptime for MSP customers.

Network Operations Center can be built internally, often in a data center, or outsourced to an external company specializing in monitoring and managing networks and infrastructure. Regardless of the design, NOC staff is responsible for identifying problems and quickly determining how to solve them.

Best Practices of Network Operations Center

Operate the network operation center team properly and employ a variety of proven best practices. These include, but are not limited to:

• Continuous monitoring of various information and network systems, such as communication lines, cloud resources, LAN / WAN systems, routers, switches, firewalls, VoIP systems, application delivery, etc.
• Respond to all incidents, interruptions, and performance issues in a timely manner.
• Classify scaling problems to the appropriate technical team.
• Recognize, identify and prioritize incidents according to the client's business requirements, organizational policies and operational impacts.
• Collect and review performance reports from various systems and report performance trends to senior technicians to help predict future problems and cuts.
• Document all actions in accordance with the company's standard policies and procedures.
• Notify customers and external service providers about problems, interruptions and repair status.
• Work with interior and exterior technical and service teams to generate or update knowledge base articles.
• Accomplish simple system tests and operational responsibilities (patch installation, network connectivity tests, script execution, etc.).
• Support multiple technical types of equipments in a 24/7 operating environment with high availability requirements. Various shift schedules may include during the day or night.

Challenges Facing Network Operations Center

Due to the complexity associated with current networks and services, especially in the context of cloud-based infrastructure and the adoption of SaaS applications, many of the challenges facing noc center is not just a complete understanding of the technology itself. Maintains simplified communication access between all parties involved.

Some key network operation challenges include:

• Lack of collaboration/coordination between teams
• The rapid pace of change in the cloud and dynamic orchestration of resources means that documents are generally not up to date to solve problems
• Troubleshooting usually takes a long time because of the data must be correlated between multiple devices and toolsets, and manual processes are required to arrive at the proper diagnosis.
• Many dissimilar tools from different vendors in use that involve workforce to work with different technologies, low-level values, and command line interface (CLI)
• A difficult happens and vanishes until all the information needed for troubleshooting is collected.
• Frequent escalation to senior staff is required to assess the root cause