Thursday, April 30, 2020

Design Best Practices of Network Operations Center

The Network Operations Center (NOC) is the central location for a data center for medium or large network monitoring efforts. Your NOC engineers use it to monitor and respond to network issues. NOC services provide an important link (usually in the form of a technician dispatched to a remote location) between finding a network problem and implementing a solution.

In many NOC operating centers (yes, the word "hub" has been repeated, but this helps to understand), 7x24x365 is open, which is not always the case. Some companies are in transition. Their network is large enough to invest in building a NOC center, but they cannot justify the cost of staffing outside regular or extended working hours. In this case, companies use alarms (via email or phone) after hours to notify call technicians on the network.

The main part of each NOC room is a central (or sometimes more) main console. This console accepts input from some, hundreds or even thousands of remote devices on your network.

When building your NOC from the ground up, avoid the many common pitfalls that can affect your performance.

You have to work very hard to ensure that all the alarms in your network can be integrated into a single integrated monitoring system. Otherwise, the difficulties associated with alarm monitoring and staffing requirements will increase. If you never have to monitor the most unfavorable monitoring systems, you can't really estimate how many problems there are. You need to turn your head, learn a lot of interfaces, and work hard to connect related alarms from different systems (these are broken by device compatibility, not by logical partitions like geography).

You should also make sure that any central console on your NOC network can filter bored alarms. Every network has its share of good alarms, but no real operator response is required. Much of this is included in your NOC, and how much you train your NOC technicians to ignore warning messages. A good LinkedIn console can hide unimportant messages from employees, making it the most important message on the list.

To learn more about NOC's requirements, it is helpful to review the example of devices now. I like to use the LNX T / MON center console because I've mentioned many.

The most useful thing about T / MON is the ability to learn algorithms (modern and old). At this point, the number is actually 25, which enables T / Mon to avoid the multi-screen headaches described above. All alarms can be stored in one central system so that computers can keep their employees busy.

T / MON can intelligently filter incoming alarm messages so that employees can focus on important alarms. You can configure the general rules used by T / Mon to make the decision to hide or display each new alarm message. In any case, D / MAN records all incoming alarms received in the Network Operations Center so that all alarms received after the event can be checked.

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