As IT infrastructures continue to proliferate, the NOC must maintain a robust toolkit to handle both new and outdated technologies and changing operational requirements.
Objectives of NOC
Any NOC’s objective is to maintain optimal network performance and availability and guarantee the ongoing availability of services essential to business operations. The NOC oversees several crucial tasks, such as:
- Monitoring network, servers, and applications for health and performance.
- Analyzing bandwidth and proactively identifying bottlenecks.
- Constantly monitoring and analyzing security threats and attacks.
- Modifying network configurations in accordance with business needs.
- Quickly picking up faults and troubleshooting to lower the mean time to repair.
Benefits of NOC Services
Establishing a Network Operations Center (NOC) offers a myriad of benefits for companies seeking to streamline their network operations and enhance overall efficiency. One significant benefit of implementing a NOC is the robust data backup capabilities it offers. Whether through automated or manual processes, a NOC tool ensures that vital data is regularly backed up, minimizing disruptions in the event of file loss or system failures. This proactive approach to data protection helps safeguard against various threats, including corruption, cyberattacks, and physical damage, thereby mitigating the risk of data loss and potential financial losses.
In addition to data backup, a NOC provides valuable antivirus support, supplementing existing antivirus software to detect and mitigate cyber threats effectively. By leveraging advanced monitoring tools and skilled technicians, NOCs can identify and address security vulnerabilities promptly, preventing potential breaches and minimizing the impact of security incidents on the organization.
Moreover, Network Operations Center streamline the management of hardware and software updates, ensuring that systems remain up-to-date and secure. By automating the update process and implementing centralized management tools, NOCs enable organizations to deploy patches and updates seamlessly across their network infrastructure, reducing the risk of software vulnerabilities and compatibility issues.
Furthermore, NOCs offer comprehensive reporting capabilities that provide insights into network performance, optimization opportunities, and overall health. By centralizing data collection and analysis, NOCs empower organizations to make data-driven decisions, identify areas for improvement, and optimize network resources effectively. This enhanced visibility into network operations enables proactive problem-solving and helps organizations optimize their IT infrastructure to meet evolving business needs.
Now, let’s look at some of the popular NOC tools used globally:
NOC TOOLS USED GLOBALLY
- SolarWinds
- LogicMonitor
- OpenNMS
- BigPanda
- Moogsoft
- ServiceNow
Solar Winds
SolarWinds is the leading provider of network management and monitoring systems. This on-premises system checks the status of infrastructure elements primarily using reasonably standard protocols like SNMP and WMI.
Its capacity to automatically create a network topology map and compile an asset inventory is a significant benefit. It is on-premise, so your company can maintain control of its data without worrying about it leaking out to any other external sources. This requires your business to sufficiently block and control access to the SolarWinds servers while having the monitoring network sufficiently locked down.
Logic Monitor
The usage of “collectors” by LogicMonitor, a fantastic cloud-based monitoring software, sets it apart from SolarWinds. These are tiny programs that run on servers, connect to resources, and then communicate with the cloud. By using collectors, monitoring is concentrated at one or a few network nodes, and only those need to communicate with the cloud.
Although LogicMonitor often has the same “heavy lift” setup as SolarWinds, your business won’t need to worry about optimizing it. In this instance, optimization is managed by the vendor and is paid for by the monthly membership price.
Open NMS
Like many other open-source programs, OpenNMS doesn’t require an upfront licensing fee. The program is free, however, depending on your company’s internal resources and the complexity of your environment, you would have to pay consulting fees for setup and implementation.
Using what it refers to as “minions,” OpenNMS can be run as an independent system, with the main OpenNMS server handling network and infrastructure monitoring. These are comparable to the “collectors” offered by Logic Monitor, which are hosted on a server and connect securely to your OpenNMS box wherever it may be.
BigPanda
BigPanda is a technology that drastically lowers IT noise for businesses and instantly recognizes incidents (before they escalate into outages). BigPanda’s ability to function in many ways like a service while still being a product—bringing certain special value-adds and a greater degree of support—is one of its most prominent features.
It is compatible with many existing monitoring, change, topology, collaboration, and ticketing applications and has a sizable library of integrations. In some cases, this allows for speedy implementation.
Moogsoft
Moogsoft provides native observability features, including metrics gathering and anomaly detection, alert correlation, and intelligent noise-reduction.
Moogsoft offers pre-built workflows and connections with notification and alerting solutions to assist teams in providing continuous assurance for their vital digital services while assisting in the quicker resolution of events.
Service Now
ServiceNow is a complete enterprise workflow platform. It enables your business to immediately set up and manage appropriate flows and configurations for incidents, changes, issues, and more. It’s an extraordinarily powerful and versatile NOC tool that is considered to be the “gold standard” among ticketing systems.
Conclusion
Organizations invest a lot of money in their IT infrastructures and NOC tools. These are some of the best NOC tools that can help you to give your team more control over tasks. They also help in placing the NOC in a position to be a complete resource for the IT department. Skillmine Technology Consulting is one of the best NOC Services Providers to partner with.
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