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What are Network Operation Centers (NOC) and how do NOC teams work?

What are Network Operation Centers (NOC) and how do NOC teams work?

December 19, 2022
What are Network Operation Centers (NOC) and how do NOC teams work?
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Introduction

Modern-day markets are highly competitive and in order to foster stronger customer relations, we see businesses striving hard to be always available and operational. Hence, businesses invest heavily to ensure higher uptime and to have dedicated teams that constantly monitor the performance of an organization’s IT resources. In this blog, we will explore what NOC teams are and why they are important.

What are NOCs?

Network Operation Centre (NOC), also called ‘knock’, is a center where teams supervise, monitor and maintain an enterprise’s resources like its IT services, databases, external services, firewalls and networks. These centers support remote monitoring and maintenance (RMM) processes. You can think of NOCs as rooms with devices that let teams visualize data about the infrastructure being monitored.

What do NOC teams do?

NOC Team structure and their contribution changes from organization to organization. A NOC engineer must:

  • Effectively collaborate and communicate with concerned team members
  • Provide timely, relevant, and detailed incident alerts to the right members
  • Keep track of key performance indicators (KPIs)
  • Back up data and engage in disaster recovery
  • Monitor and manage network security
  • Do preventive maintenance and health reviews

Benefits of NOC

Organizations that have dedicated NOCs be it in-house/on-premises or outsourced can expect to reap some or all of the following benefits:

  • With 24/7 monitoring, it helps identify system issues/threats and promotes quick incident response thus reducing downtime.
  • The IT teams are freed to work on things that are vital to the company, then just the routine maintenance or patching work.
  • NOCs, save organizations the trouble of manually troubleshooting, installing and updating their hardware and software. 
  • With improved infrastructure many organizations benefit from better administration and on-demand reporting.
  • With their monitoring capabilities NOCs help reduce unwanted alerts and reduce alert fatigue.

Choosing the right Monitoring tools for your NOC teams

While choosing NOC tools, looking for features that enhance or ease your NOC teams’ operations is important. Some common features an organization should look for is,

  • Ease of incident tracking or ticketing
  • Ability to monitor infrastructure and user experience
  • Ease of Automation

While choosing an organization should consider the following factors,

  • The nature of data being tracked: Real-time or historical or both
  • Time needed to manage your network and IT resources. 
  • Complexity of your IT resources
  • Need for 24/7 monitoring
  • Tools and systems that you want to integrate with your IT services

Here is a list of popular NOC tools, 

Solarwinds Orion

SolarWinds Orion is a scalable infrastructure monitoring and management platform. It is designed to simplify IT administration for on-premises, hybrid, and software-as-a-service (SaaS) environments, in a single pane of glass. SolarWinds Orion ensures you do not have to struggle with numerous incompatible point monitoring products, as it consolidates the full suite of monitoring capabilities into one platform with cross-stack integrated functionality.

LogicMonitor

LogicMonitor is a fully-automated, cloud-based infrastructure monitoring platform for Enterprise IT and Managed Service Providers giving full-stack visibility into networks, cloud, and servers with one unified view. 

Zabbix

is a mature, enterprise-level platform that allows you to monitor large-scale IT environments comprising servers, networks, applications, services and cloud. 

Datadog

Datadog is a monitoring platform for cloud applications that bring together data from servers, containers, databases, and third-party services, thus providing observability into the entire stack.

NewRelic

New Relic is an observability platform built to help engineers create more perfect software. From monoliths to serverless, you can instrument everything, and then analyze, troubleshoot, and optimize your entire software stack, from one place.

How does Squadcast help Organizations that have NOC Teams?

Network Operations Center (NOC) teams monitor and manage IT resources. To ensure high availability, they need:

  • Quick alerts for the incidents once they are noticed
  • Tools for alert Prioritization, Management, and Suppression
  • Ability to monitor infrastructure in different environments
  • Retrospectives and Postmortems to prevent or limit future failures

Squadcast is a Reliability Workflow Platform that unites On-Call Alerting, Incident Management and SRE workflows in one offering. It can help organizations by:

In recent times, traditional NOC teams have struggled with several aspects of infrastructure management. With organizations moving to the cloud, and the availability of monitoring and Incident Management tools, the operational processes have undergone several changes in recent years. There is a need to reduce manual work so smaller teams can manage larger infrastructures more efficiently. Organizations can leverage tools like Squadcast to transform their static, manual-driven networks into dynamic, automated, software-defined networks to connect a wide range of users for effective monitoring and timely response. By offering all these capabilities Squadcast helps organizations in:

  • Reducing their dependency on NOC teams
  • Reducing the NOC team’s workload so the team can be downsized
  • Boost overall Incident Response and alerting efforts

Conclusion

It is essential to have NOCs as they help you increase efficiency and reduce operational costs by combining resources under one roof. They play a vital role in communicating important metrics and meeting tight SLAs. But with the right tools and resources, organizations/NOC teams can automate repetitive processes, lower errors, and leverage available bandwidth to increase productivity.

Written By:
December 19, 2022
Vishal Padghan
Vishal Padghan
December 19, 2022
Best Practices
DevOps
Cloud Computing
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Squadcast is a leader in Incident Management on G2 Squadcast is a leader in Mid-Market IT Service Management (ITSM) Tools on G2 Squadcast is a leader in Americas IT Alerting on G2 Best IT Management Products 2024 Squadcast is a leader in Europe IT Alerting on G2 Squadcast is a leader in Enterprise Incident Management on G2 Users love Squadcast on G2
Squadcast is a leader in Incident Management on G2 Squadcast is a leader in Mid-Market IT Service Management (ITSM) Tools on G2 Squadcast is a leader in Americas IT Alerting on G2
Best IT Management Products 2024 Squadcast is a leader in Europe IT Alerting on G2 Squadcast is a leader in Enterprise Incident Management on G2
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What are Network Operation Centers (NOC) and how do NOC teams work?

Dec 19, 2022
Last Updated:
September 10, 2024
Share this post:
What are Network Operation Centers (NOC) and how do NOC teams work?
Table of Contents:

    Introduction

    Modern-day markets are highly competitive and in order to foster stronger customer relations, we see businesses striving hard to be always available and operational. Hence, businesses invest heavily to ensure higher uptime and to have dedicated teams that constantly monitor the performance of an organization’s IT resources. In this blog, we will explore what NOC teams are and why they are important.

    What are NOCs?

    Network Operation Centre (NOC), also called ‘knock’, is a center where teams supervise, monitor and maintain an enterprise’s resources like its IT services, databases, external services, firewalls and networks. These centers support remote monitoring and maintenance (RMM) processes. You can think of NOCs as rooms with devices that let teams visualize data about the infrastructure being monitored.

    What do NOC teams do?

    NOC Team structure and their contribution changes from organization to organization. A NOC engineer must:

    • Effectively collaborate and communicate with concerned team members
    • Provide timely, relevant, and detailed incident alerts to the right members
    • Keep track of key performance indicators (KPIs)
    • Back up data and engage in disaster recovery
    • Monitor and manage network security
    • Do preventive maintenance and health reviews

    Benefits of NOC

    Organizations that have dedicated NOCs be it in-house/on-premises or outsourced can expect to reap some or all of the following benefits:

    • With 24/7 monitoring, it helps identify system issues/threats and promotes quick incident response thus reducing downtime.
    • The IT teams are freed to work on things that are vital to the company, then just the routine maintenance or patching work.
    • NOCs, save organizations the trouble of manually troubleshooting, installing and updating their hardware and software. 
    • With improved infrastructure many organizations benefit from better administration and on-demand reporting.
    • With their monitoring capabilities NOCs help reduce unwanted alerts and reduce alert fatigue.

    Choosing the right Monitoring tools for your NOC teams

    While choosing NOC tools, looking for features that enhance or ease your NOC teams’ operations is important. Some common features an organization should look for is,

    • Ease of incident tracking or ticketing
    • Ability to monitor infrastructure and user experience
    • Ease of Automation

    While choosing an organization should consider the following factors,

    • The nature of data being tracked: Real-time or historical or both
    • Time needed to manage your network and IT resources. 
    • Complexity of your IT resources
    • Need for 24/7 monitoring
    • Tools and systems that you want to integrate with your IT services

    Here is a list of popular NOC tools, 

    Solarwinds Orion

    SolarWinds Orion is a scalable infrastructure monitoring and management platform. It is designed to simplify IT administration for on-premises, hybrid, and software-as-a-service (SaaS) environments, in a single pane of glass. SolarWinds Orion ensures you do not have to struggle with numerous incompatible point monitoring products, as it consolidates the full suite of monitoring capabilities into one platform with cross-stack integrated functionality.

    LogicMonitor

    LogicMonitor is a fully-automated, cloud-based infrastructure monitoring platform for Enterprise IT and Managed Service Providers giving full-stack visibility into networks, cloud, and servers with one unified view. 

    Zabbix

    is a mature, enterprise-level platform that allows you to monitor large-scale IT environments comprising servers, networks, applications, services and cloud. 

    Datadog

    Datadog is a monitoring platform for cloud applications that bring together data from servers, containers, databases, and third-party services, thus providing observability into the entire stack.

    NewRelic

    New Relic is an observability platform built to help engineers create more perfect software. From monoliths to serverless, you can instrument everything, and then analyze, troubleshoot, and optimize your entire software stack, from one place.

    How does Squadcast help Organizations that have NOC Teams?

    Network Operations Center (NOC) teams monitor and manage IT resources. To ensure high availability, they need:

    • Quick alerts for the incidents once they are noticed
    • Tools for alert Prioritization, Management, and Suppression
    • Ability to monitor infrastructure in different environments
    • Retrospectives and Postmortems to prevent or limit future failures

    Squadcast is a Reliability Workflow Platform that unites On-Call Alerting, Incident Management and SRE workflows in one offering. It can help organizations by:

    In recent times, traditional NOC teams have struggled with several aspects of infrastructure management. With organizations moving to the cloud, and the availability of monitoring and Incident Management tools, the operational processes have undergone several changes in recent years. There is a need to reduce manual work so smaller teams can manage larger infrastructures more efficiently. Organizations can leverage tools like Squadcast to transform their static, manual-driven networks into dynamic, automated, software-defined networks to connect a wide range of users for effective monitoring and timely response. By offering all these capabilities Squadcast helps organizations in:

    • Reducing their dependency on NOC teams
    • Reducing the NOC team’s workload so the team can be downsized
    • Boost overall Incident Response and alerting efforts

    Conclusion

    It is essential to have NOCs as they help you increase efficiency and reduce operational costs by combining resources under one roof. They play a vital role in communicating important metrics and meeting tight SLAs. But with the right tools and resources, organizations/NOC teams can automate repetitive processes, lower errors, and leverage available bandwidth to increase productivity.

    What you should do now
    • Schedule a demo with Squadcast to learn about the platform, answer your questions, and evaluate if Squadcast is the right fit for you.
    • Curious about how Squadcast can assist you in implementing SRE best practices? Discover the platform's capabilities through our Interactive Demo.
    • Enjoyed the article? Explore further insights on the best SRE practices.
    • Schedule a demo with Squadcast to learn about the platform, answer your questions, and evaluate if Squadcast is the right fit for you.
    • Curious about how Squadcast can assist you in implementing SRE best practices? Discover the platform's capabilities through our Interactive Demo.
    • Enjoyed the article? Explore further insights on the best SRE practices.
    • Get a walkthrough of our platform through this Interactive Demo and see how it can solve your specific challenges.
    • See how Charter Leveraged Squadcast to Drive Client Success With Robust Incident Management.
    • Share this blog post with someone you think will find it useful. Share it on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Reddit
    • Get a walkthrough of our platform through this Interactive Demo and see how it can solve your specific challenges.
    • See how Charter Leveraged Squadcast to Drive Client Success With Robust Incident Management
    • Share this blog post with someone you think will find it useful. Share it on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Reddit
    • Get a walkthrough of our platform through this Interactive Demo and see how it can solve your specific challenges.
    • See how Charter Leveraged Squadcast to Drive Client Success With Robust Incident Management
    • Share this blog post with someone you think will find it useful. Share it on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Reddit
    What you should do now?
    Here are 3 ways you can continue your journey to learn more about Unified Incident Management
    Discover the platform's capabilities through our Interactive Demo.
    See how Charter Leveraged Squadcast to Drive Client Success With Robust Incident Management.
    Share the article
    Share this blog post on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit or LinkedIn.
    We’ll show you how Squadcast works and help you figure out if Squadcast is the right fit for you.
    Experience the benefits of Squadcast's Incident Management and On-Call solutions firsthand.
    Compare our plans and find the perfect fit for your business.
    See Redis' Journey to Efficient Incident Management through alert noise reduction With Squadcast.
    Discover the platform's capabilities through our Interactive Demo.
    We’ll show you how Squadcast works and help you figure out if Squadcast is the right fit for you.
    Experience the benefits of Squadcast's Incident Management and On-Call solutions firsthand.
    Compare Squadcast & PagerDuty / Opsgenie
    Compare and see if Squadcast is the right fit for your needs.
    Compare our plans and find the perfect fit for your business.
    Learn how Scoro created a solid foundation for better on-call practices with Squadcast.
    Discover the platform's capabilities through our Interactive Demo.
    We’ll show you how Squadcast works and help you figure out if Squadcast is the right fit for you.
    Experience the benefits of Squadcast's Incident Management and On-Call solutions firsthand.
    We’ll show you how Squadcast works and help you figure out if Squadcast is the right fit for you.
    Learn how Scoro created a solid foundation for better on-call practices with Squadcast.
    We’ll show you how Squadcast works and help you figure out if Squadcast is the right fit for you.
    Discover the platform's capabilities through our Interactive Demo.
    Enjoyed the article? Explore further insights on the best SRE practices.
    We’ll show you how Squadcast works and help you figure out if Squadcast is the right fit for you.
    Experience the benefits of Squadcast's Incident Management and On-Call solutions firsthand.
    Enjoyed the article? Explore further insights on the best SRE practices.
    Written By:
    December 19, 2022
    December 19, 2022
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    bibam
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    By moving to Squadcast from Pagerduty, we have seen a serious reduction in alert fatigue, allowing us to focus...
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