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.
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.
NOC Team structure and their contribution changes from organization to organization. A NOC engineer must:
Organizations that have dedicated NOCs be it in-house/on-premises or outsourced can expect to reap some or all of the following benefits:
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,
While choosing an organization should consider the following factors,
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.
Network Operations Center (NOC) teams monitor and manage IT resources. To ensure high availability, they need:
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:
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.