What is a network operations center (NOC)?

NOC specialists manage and monitor networks that contain hundreds, or even millions, of servers.

It’s important for NOC to manage communication line alarms, performance issues, or power outages that will affect an organization’s network.

Engineers working in NOC must monitor satellite network environments that are in charge of processing large amounts of voice and video data.

NOC engineers handle incidents and complaints about network issues. They also oversee requests for updates, reports, new orders, and anything else relevant to NOC duties.

Shift supervisors or NOC engineers generally oversee escalations when standard troubleshooting hasn’t worked, and any escalated issues need to be addressed quickly.

Prioritization is handled by shift supervisors—they monitor tickets and incidents and assign them out based on their level of importance and priority to ensure that the most-critical tasks are completed within established deadlines.

A knowledge base is a centralized place for all documentation and information, and is always readily accessible to any team member. Fluid and up to date, a centralized knowledge center provinces a single location for relevant information, and maintains important incident data to help mitigate potential damage from recurring issues.

Ticketing systems track all issues, account for their urgency and severity, and assign responsibilities. Tickets that arise from issues provide a description of the issue, which allows it to be processed and assigned to the correct place. In the event that a department or individual cannot complete an assigned task, it can be moved to the next level.

It’s important to create reports on a daily and monthly basis—the previous 24 hours should be included in each daily report, and should include every major incident that occurred during that time. Any incident that was resolved needs to have the root cause listed. These reports help you understand the activities of NOC and any significant issues that occurred, and provide information on any trends that may need to be addressed.

Infrastructure monitoring
Networks, servers, and the data center all combine to make up the environment of an infrastructure, which allows the system to be protected by threats through early detection and resolution.

User experience monitoring
Simulating user activities and behavior, issues can be duplicated and solutions identified. This allows businesses to not only fix real issues as they arise, but also ideate solutions to potential issues that may arise in the future.

NOC provides the opportunity to automate repetitive daily tasks, which frees up more time for the IT team to deal with other services like cleaning up disk space, resetting passwords, and handling restart services.

NOC technicians interact with clients to keep them abreast of issues and any necessary NOC updates.

Technicians need to monitor NOC to ensure that any companies using NOC receive timely user and outage reports. This helps ensure that their network is secure and isn’t running into any handling issues.

There are many services provided by NOC, and it is the job of the technicians and engineers to make sure that the NOC is properly running and working correctly to serve the needs of the company.

NOCs all have standard operating procedures that staff must follow while monitoring. It is their duty to respond to any and all alarms that are activated during their shift, and respond according to the standard operating procedures.

NOC technicians are meant to monitor the protocols of a company’s LAN/WAN infrastructure to ensure that everything is running smoothly and there is no misuse occuring on the company’s side.

It is the duty of a NOC to provide 24/7 security and backup to ensure that a company’s network is up and working at all times.

One of the essential jobs of NOC to add new data routes when necessary and make sure that current data routes are properly maintained. They must also repair any routes that are experiencing problems.

Companies have the ability to send troubleshooting tickets to a NOC, and it is the job of a technician to manage the tickets and ensure that they are resolved in a timely manner.

Networks occasionally experience outages, and it is the role of NOC to troubleshoot any network outages and prevent them from reoccurring.

NOC is expected to provide reports to all companies that are using the NOC to report on information like server utilization, uptime, and bandwidth usage.

Any network connected device has an IP address, so it is crucial to survey the IP addresses to prevent any malicious network attacks.

With ServiceNow AI-powered Service Operations, NOCs can predict problems before they occur, prevent impact to users, and automate cross-team workflows for resolution. ServiceNow provides robust visibility with discovery and service mapping for business context. In addition, event management and health log analytics power Predictive AIOps to reduce the risk of downtime.