NOC Best Practices Process Management and Documentation

NOC Stands for Network Operation Center some time called by KNOCK. It is a central location or a place for controlling and monitoring the network devices, servers, datacenters. Companies like Web hosting , ISPs and those are having huge IT Infrastructure, Network, Critical Servers and Data centers need to implement NOC. NOC implementation mostly done upon two models, 1st on-site model and 2nd remote model. Both of the models I will describe in my upcoming blog.

I have already described about Network Operation Center Best Practices in terms of process like    

1.    Ticketing system
2.    Knowledge base
3.    Reporting
4.    Monitoring      

Now this time I am going to reveal NOC best practices in terms of management and process documented. Following these points NOC Administrator can manage his process better way.

1.    Incident Detection and Notification
2.    Documenting of Incidents and handling
3.    Documenting Syslog messages
4.    Documenting Vendor Software Bugs
5.    Shift to Shift Hand over procedures
6.    Commonly used scripts for monitoring
7.    Frequently testing High Availability
8.    Capturing config changes.

Network Operations Center Best Practices 2013

ProVal Technologies After Hours NOC Service  

The Network Operations Center is the most important part for an organization involving into network monitoring process on a large scale. Inside this center there are a number of operators and administrators who handle the network issues and produce a relevant and quick solution for it. The NOC is like a central part of the IT department that implements the best procedure to give a solution to any network issue. 

Here we are discussing about what should be the best practices and procedures of the Network Operations Center to provide their clients maximum productivity into their core business operations. Due to the increasing tasks and obligations NOCs have become an important part of our organizations. Under this different unexpected issues comes at any time and we have to solve them. For this we must have the best tools and practices to deal with the situation. 

There are various essential elements while managing an NOC and they are very crucial for the growth of the organization. So let us have a brief discussion on these tools. These tools help you to update your IT team about the information necessary for the management of a NOC. The main tool or the first one is the ticketing system. Tickets are generated by the clients about the issues and the IT team from the network operations center has to look after it and solve the issues. It also helps to update the IT department about the open or unsolved problems. They have to take them according to the requirement of the client and according to the urgency. 

Another tool is about the knowledge base and the past experiences of the issues occurred. Keep a record of them and keep the knowledge base updated time to time so that all the team members can be able to take references from it. Some training modules can also be made and run according to the requirement. This can be gathered information in the forms of books, newspapers, magazines, self-written notes, CDs, online database and many more. These can be useful to many people inside or outside the organization.
 

Reporting is another important practice of the working of a NOC. It involves intimation about the major events happened on a daily basis. The IT department leaders and the department managers require these reports to make and enhance the productivity of the process. This reporting helps to keep the record of the daily activities of the NOC services and other events. Then all these reports are summarized to make a monthly report to know about the areas of improvement.

Monitoring is the important process of the network operations center. It comprises the monitoring of the infrastructure of the clients IT department like servers, network devices, data center monitoring etc. They consider the environment into a real time monitoring and inform the client about the issues and try to fix them before they cause any downtime to the business operations. In this way they are the productivity enhancer mechanism of the business. Not only this, automation is another aspect that enhances the productivity and time of the business and also considered as one of the best practices offered by the network operations centers.