NOC Services

 The NOC pronounces "hit". There is a centralized remote location to monitor, manage and manage the network operations of any MSP (administrative service provider).

The NOC technician directly monitors and manages the RMM software. Therefore, MSP can provide its clients with efficient and responsive services.

Job Description - Roles and Responsibilities

NOC engineers / technicians are responsible for the operation of the entire network, from network infrastructure to security issues. They undoubtedly guarantee the efficient and smooth operation of the network of any organization.

Depending on the terms and conditions of work, a NOC technician will independently resolve the issues or increase the penalty to inform the MSP of your issues. The NOC technician classifies the problem according to severity or other criteria established between the two parties.

NOC services: technical levels

The NOC technical team will be reinforced according to their experience. NOC Services provided at different levels. For example:

1) Level 1 monitoring services include online monitoring of network operations. A Level 1 technician deals with minor issues, such as hardware failure or minor issues. If the problem is not resolved here or if it falls into the next level category, please refer it to the level 2 team.

2) Level 2 monitoring and administration services include monitoring and administration of the overall network operation. To work at these different levels, the MSP employs different NOC technicians to provide the necessary assistance.

NOC technicians are constantly working on the R&D of various potential network problems and looking for solutions so that, when they encounter that problem in the future, they have an answer. R&D requires a lot of investment, resources and time for network operations, which is generally not possible for all companies. Offers the benefit to all managed NOC service providers.

NOC is not a support service

Must be clear about NOC services; NOC is not a support service provider. Although NOC provides an example of a number of network related services, it explicitly excludes the help desk.

Often people are very confused about this and sign a contract; It is advisable to eliminate this concept before taking any NOC service from the network operations center.

The helpdesk is a call center that provides any company with the problems faced by its customers. The NOC oversees the management of service providers and addresses work and communication issues only with MSP staff.

Every time an MSP receives a problem from a client, it receives proposals from the NOC operator at the end.

NOC is a B2B service provider and never comes on the scene during network operations. NOC equipment processing is limited to your customers' MSP / IT service providers. The end user always has the idea to get all the services related to IT / network operations from their MSP or IT service provider.

NOC provides an extra hand to the current MSP team so they can focus on further development and business development activities, leaving all network operations of the NOC team.

The Services a NOC Provides

If you want high system availability, you need infrastructure monitoring tools that can reliably monitor and alert on a flexible set of metrics. These measures measure the daily health of your infrastructure. A well-designed network infrastructure works normally without problems, i.e. until, for example, excessive bandwidth saturation creates excessive latency which leads to failure.

NOC Monitoring Services to detect and correct infrastructure accidents. These services include monitoring the integrity and availability of:

• Networks
• Router and switch
• The waiters
• Applications
• Internet sites
• Firewall
• VPN tunnel
• Wireless access points
• LAN / WAN / MAN
• Power systems and installations

Professional NOC Services are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to monitor the network infrastructure. With additional level 1 repair services, they will work to prevent errors and degradation, resolve problems before they become expensive downtime and limit outages.

Services That NOC’s Augment - What They Do, and Don’t Do

Internet security

Strictly speaking, an NOC is not a resource dedicated to security oversight - that's what security operations centers (or SOCs) need. However, thanks to its 24/7 surveillance, it acts as a vanguard for operational security centers. NOCs can monitor and respond to security warnings from firewalls and security monitoring devices. For example, A NOC can be integrated into ATMs and their system validations can detect machine failures or possible forgeries associated with skimming ATMs. The NOC can inform those who must respond within minutes, rather than hours, of the accident, thus mitigating further losses.

A NOC can be an early warning for something that's not entirely fair. For example, network monitoring can detect excessive connection errors, scan open backdoor ports, or attempt to break a firewall. Bots and all types of malware can enter through the backdoor or through the firewall. Network monitoring can detect user access and behavior for comparison with current known threats through proactive network monitoring. Therefore, although the NOCs do not provide security services, their surveillance and reporting could trigger alarm signals that could be passed on to the appropriate security officers.

MSP and helpdesk

A NOC can act as a "silent" MSP partner as long as the end-user is not aware of the presence of the NOC. NOC technicians work with the MSP provider to provide first-class behind-the-scenes assistance for specialized services.

As for the helpdesk, an important distinction and the main difference is that a helpdesk interacts with end-users; the NOC interacts with IT staff. The NOC is the service partner that the IT team relies on for system stability.

So all this high-level support capability leads to an important question: should you hire, train and pay the best price for NOC technicians to fill your IT skills gap? If you are an MSP, this would increase operating costs. If you are running a business, you probably don't want the extra drain on wages and training costs, not to mention the acquisition and updating of the technology.

What Network operations? & Best Practices

Network operations refer to activities carried out by internal network personnel or third parties on which companies and service providers rely on to monitor, manage and respond to alerts on the availability and performance of their network. Staff with primary responsibility for network operations are often referred to as network operations analysts or network operations engineers.

A Network Operations Center, often referred to as a NOC (pronounced "knock"), is typically a centralized location where network operations staff provide 24/7 surveillance, monitoring, and management, 7 days a week, 365 days a week. day, 365 days a year This infrastructure environment can be located on the site and / or with a cloud provider.

Some key activities in the functioning of the network are:

• Network monitoring
• Accident response
• Communication management (e-mail, voice and video)
• Performance, quality and optimization reports
• Software/firmware installation, troubleshooting, and updating of network elements
• Patch management
• Backup and archiving
• Firewall management
• Intrusion prevention system (IPS) and other tools and implementation and monitoring of security tools, in collaboration with Security Operations
• Threat analysis and explosion beam analysis in collaboration with security operations

Challenges Facing Network Operations

Due to the complexity of today's NOC Services, especially in light of the adoption of cloud-based infrastructure and SaaS applications, network operations personnel face many challenges not only related to a deep understanding of the technology itself, but maintains simplified access to communications between all parties involved.

Here are some of the main challenges related to the functioning of the network:

• Lack of collaboration / coordination between the teams
• The rapid pace of change in the cloud and the orchestration of dynamic resources means that the documentation is not generally updated to solve problems
• Troubleshooting takes time as it often correlates data between multiple devices and toolsets and requires manual processes to achieve reliable diagnoses
• Many different tools from different vendors used may require staff to work with different technologies, low-level utilities and command-line interfaces (CLI)
• Problems arise and then disappear when all the information is needed for troubleshooting
• Climbing leaders is often necessary to evaluate the root causes

Network Operation best Practices 

Well-managed network management teams adopt a variety of proven best practices. These include, but are not limited to:

• Continuously monitor a wide range of information and network systems including communication circuits, cloud resources, LAN / WAN systems, routers, switches, firewalls, and VoIP systems and application delivery.
• Provide a rapid response to all accidents, failures and performance problems.
• Classification of problems to be passed on to appropriate technical teams.
• Recognize, identify and prioritize incidents in accordance with customers' corporate requirements, organizational policies and operational impact.
• Collect and review performance reports for various systems and communicate performance trends to senior technical staff to help them predict future problems or outages.
• Document all actions in accordance with standard corporate policies and procedures.
• Notify customers and third-party service providers of problems, outages and repair status.
• Collaborate with internal and external technical and service teams to create and/or update knowledge base articles.
• Perform basic tests of systems and operating activities (installation of patches, network connectivity tests, execution of scripts, etc.).
• Support for several technical teams in 24/7 operating environments with high availability requirements. Various shift times can include daytime or evening hours.

In this list of best practices, the staff is more likely to focus on network performance today than application availability. But application availability and performance are essential to achieve the business objectives of companies and service providers. Moving applications to the cloud will be the main driver of network operations, spending more time on application availability and performance in the future. More specifically, network operations teams will need to ensure that internal and external networks and services do not prevent application availability, but rather speed up their delivery.

Network Intelligence technology faces many challenges associated with pursuing the best network operational practices. To ensure optimal network and application performance, network operations teams need detailed and accurate visibility of the network path, as well as routing and application layer data.

What Does Network Operation Center (NOC) Mean?

A Network Operations Center (NOC) is a central location where network administrators manage, control, and monitor one or more networks. The overall function is to maintain optimal network operation on a variety of platforms, media and communication channels.

Large network service providers are connected to network operations centers that provide a visual representation of monitored networks and workstations, where detailed network statuses are monitored. Software is used to manage networks. Telecommunications, television programs and computer networks are controlled through network operations centers.

Network Operations Centers are also called Network Management Centers.

A network operations center monitors the telecommunications network for specific alarms or conditions that may require special attention to avoid affecting network performance. They monitor power outages, communication line alerts, and performance issues that can affect networks. NOC Services  can analyze problems, fix bugs, communicate with local technicians, and track issues until they are resolved. Networking Centers are the primary focus for troubleshooting, software distribution, and updating router and domain name management in conjunction with connected networks and for performance monitoring.

Network operations centers include desktop-facing video wall lines that display important alarm details, incidents in progress, and overall network performance. The backplanes of the network operations centers are glazed and members of the major incident management team use an adjoining room. Individual tables are associated with a specific technology. Technicians have multiple monitors on their desks, with additional monitors used to monitor desktops.

Network Operation Centers handle issues hierarchically, informing the next level to speed problem resolution if a problem is not resolved within a given time period. Most network operation centers have multiple levels that define the capabilities of a network operation center technician. Problems that go through a NOC are escalated hierarchically. If an escalated issue is not resolved within the set time, it will be escalated to the next level for a quick fix.

Almost all web hosting companies and ISPs use NOC Services to control and manage internal communication and email account management.

What are the NOC Services?

NOC is central to distributing and updating software, monitoring performance, coordinating with connected networks, troubleshooting network issues, and managing routers and domain names.

But that is not all. There are various NOC Services, including the following:

• Performance reports and improvement suggestions
• Monitor and manage firewall and intrusion prevention systems
• Network Discovery and Evaluation
• Quality of Service Optimization and Reporting
• Patch Management and Whitelist
• Backup and storage management
• Email management services
• Voice and video traffic management
• Antivirus Scanning and Correction
• Joint threat analysis
• policy enforcement

Application software installation, troubleshooting, and upgrade

In terms of responsibilities, NOC monitors each hop, network flow, server, and a terminal connected to an MSP's client networks. They also help to monitor infrastructure capacity and conditions and make adjustments and decisions to ensure that networks perform optimally and productivity is organized.

If NOC indicates something, depending on the relationship between NOC and MSP, teams can work to resolve the problem and identify the source of the problem to prevent future problems.

Is a NOC the Same as a Help Desk?

No, an NOC and technical support are not interchangeable services. The big difference between the two is that tech support has all the interaction between end-users.

NOC provides backend maintenance, support, and troubleshooting to help MSP respond to potential customer issues. Technical support is a call center set up to receive questions directly from end-users who are experiencing a problem.

In summary, if an end-user has a problem, contact technical support. If the MSP has a program, it will contact the NOC.