Network Operations Center (NOC) Design Best Practices

The Network Operations Center (NOC) provides a central location for the data center from any medium or large-scale network monitoring efforts. In this document, your NOC engineers will monitor and respond to network issues. Their NOC services are an important link between network discovery and solution implementation (often in the form of remote technical support).

Although most NOC operating centers (yes, the word “centers” are redundant, but easier to understand) are 7x24x365 open, this is not always the case. Some companies are in a period of growth. Their system is large enough to justify the investment in the construction of the NOC center, but they are not yet able to take into account the costs of employees other than normal or extended working hours. In this case, companies use out-of-hours (e-mail or phone) alerts to alert technicians when they receive a network alert.

The heart of any NOC room is one (or sometimes several) main console. This console receives input from several, hundreds, or thousands of remote devices in your network.

When you create your NOC from scratch, avoid some common pitfalls that will negatively affect your productivity.

A lot of work needs to be done to ensure that all alerts on your network can be integrated into a single tracking system. Otherwise, the complexity and staffing requirements associated with surveillance alerts increase. If you’ve never been cursed when you have to control unparalleled surveillance systems, you may not feel how difficult it is. You’ll need to keep your head down quickly, learn many interfaces, and struggle to connect alerts from different systems (divided by device compatibility, not logical division like geography).

You should also make sure that a central network is installed on the NOC that can filter alerts. It’s nice to be connected to any system, but there’s a warning quota that doesn’t really need an operator response. The more NOC, the more you will teach NOC technicians not to pay attention to warning messages. A good center console can hide unimportant messages from employees that allow important messages to be at the top of the list.

It will now be useful to review the device model to become familiar with NOC requirements. I like to use the T / Mon LNX center console because it covers most of the concepts I just mentioned.