Network operations center best practices (3)
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This document discusses best practices for Network Operations Centers (NOCs). It covers essential tools like ticketing systems, knowledgebases, reporting and monitoring. Implementing these tools helps NOCs keep track of issues, share knowledge, measure performance, and monitor infrastructure and user experience. The document also discusses defining roles and responsibilities clearly to avoid delays in decision making and assigning work appropriately based on skills. Defining operator and shift manager roles helps prioritize tasks and escalate issues effectively.
Network operations center best practices (3)
- 1. Network Operations Center Best Practices 1
- 2. Introduction Any Network Operation Centers (NOC’s) is always under a great pressure to meet the demands of its organization’s business needs. The technological challenges keep growing and unforeseen problems always arrive. In fact, the only part you can count on to shrink are resources. What’s the best you can do? Make sure you’re employing the best practices, using the appropriate tools, and optimizing your processes and knowledge. This is what this e-book is all about. … this stills needs to be re-worked – the intro we had for the blog is too short and did not work here… I wrote something fast, but see if you want something else.. Do you have any statistics, graphs, or can direct me to some locations, so we can add some visuals to the e-book?
- 3. Part 1: Tools You know tools are an essential element in NOC management. But they are also a key element for improvement. So what are the tools that will give you the top return or investment? (this parts needs to be enhanced too…)
- 4. 5 essential tools Ticketing system A ticketing system will enable you to keep track of all open issues, according to severity, urgency and the person assigned to handle each task. Knowing all pending issues will help you to prioritize the shift’s tasks and provide the best service to your customers. Knowledgebase Keep a one centralized source for all knowledge and documentation that is accessible to your entire team. This knowledge base should be a fluid information source to be continuously updated with experiences and lessons learned for future reference and improvements.
- 5. Reporting and measurements Create reports on a daily and monthly basis. A daily report should include all major incidents of the past 24 hours and a root cause for every resolved incident. This report is useful and essential for the shift leaders and NOC managers. It also keeps the rest of the IT department informed about the NOC activities and of major incidents. Compiling the daily reports into a monthly report will help measure the team’s progress. It will also show areas where improvements can be made or indicate any positive or negative trends in performance.
- 6. Monitoring There are two types of monitoring processes relevant to NOC: • Infrastructure monitoring, which can consist of the servers, the network or the data center environment. • User experience monitoring involves the simulation of user behavior and activities in order to replicate problems and find the most effective solutions. Implementing a service tree model that connects the monitoring infrastructure with an affected service will allow your team to alert other areas that may be affected by the problems experienced.
- 7. IT Process Automation Implementing IT Process Automation significantly reduces mean time to recovery (MTTR) and helps NOCs meet SLA’s by having a procedure in place to handle incident resolution and to consistently provide high quality response regardless of complexity of the process. IT Process Automation empowers a Level-one team to deal with tasks that otherwise might require a Level-two team. Some examples include password reset, disk space clean- up, reset services etc. IT Process Automation is also a major help with reducing the number of manual, routine IT tasks and free up time for more strategic projects..
- 8. Part 2: Knowledge & skills By ‘knowledge and skills’ we do not mean the obvious technical knowledge, network ‘know-how’ your team members must hold in order to run day-to-day operations, but rather – How you can ensure your team’s skills are used to their best potential, and how to keep those skills up to date over time.
- 9. Clearly define roles Definition of roles may vary between data centers and will depend on team size, the IT environment and tasks. Still, there should be a clear distinction between the roles and responsibilities of operators vs. shift supervisors in the NOC. Why does it matter? Mainly matters because of Decisions making. Without clearly defined roles and responsibilities, a disagreement between operators may lead to late decisions and actions, or to no decisions taken at all. This may affect customers, critical business services, and urgent requests during off hours. It should be clearly defined, therefore, that a shift manager makes the final decisions.
- 10. Tasks & responsibilities Another potential problem caused by a lack of role definition is the division of tasks between operators and the shift leader. A shift manager should be responsible for: prioritizing tasks, assigning work to operators based on their skills, verifying that tickets are opened properly and that relevant personnel are notified when required, escalating problems, communicating with management during important NOC events, sending notifications to the entire organization, preparing reports, and making critical decisions that impact many services, such as shutting down the data center in case of an emergency.
- 11. Operators, on the other hand, are responsible for handling the technical aspect of incidents – either independently or by escalating to another team member with the required skills. Operators are also responsible for following up and keep tickets up to date. While it might sound as if operators lack independence and responsibility, this is not the case. When faced with technical challenges, operators’ input and skills are probably the most critical for resolution and smooth NOC operation. Operators provide additional insights into problems, and can provide creative solutions when the standard procedures fail to work.