NOC Best Practices

Mon Aug 9 14:01:59 UTC 2010

Hello Kim

I am also interested in NOC best practices, but have found out that it 
is not easy to find much documented on the subject. I think as most seem 
to have already answered in your thread, that is because every NOC is a 
little different from the other. Specially depending on the type of 
organisation or company they are working for.

One of the things we have done in the research and educational community 
in Europe is to start a Task Force[1] on the topic. The task force has 
not really kicked off yet, so unfortunately we don't have any answers to 
your questions yet. I also guess your from a commercial company which 
might have a little different priorities than "we" do. That said, maybe 
looking at our questions and problems, might give you some food for 
thoughts in regards to what is important for your NOC.

Following my link[2] below you can find our Terms of Reference. 
Basically what we are aiming to investigate and what we initially think 
is interesting to discuss in regards to a NOC.

Not sure if it is helpful for you, but during our initial discussions 
around the task force we had some presentations about the NOC from 
different kinds of organisations. You can find the presentation slides 
on our meeting page[3].

If you are interested in ITIL and operations I can recommend the 
following two books:
IT Service Management Based on ITIL V3, A Pocket Guide
The Visible OPS Handbook, Implementing ITIL in 4 practical and auditable 
steps

They are fairly easily read and make some good points. But if you 
consider implementing ITIL, be aware of the fact that it is easy to 
overcomplicating things. I would recommend starting out small and only 
use the things you think makes sense in regards to your organisation.

Someone in this thread mentioned e-tom[4] which is published by TMForum. 
TMForum publish best practices in among other things operations, the 
downside is that you have to be a member to access most of their 
published documents.

[1] http://www.terena.org/activities/tf-noc/
[2] http://www.terena.org/activities/tf-noc/tf-noc-tor_v3.pdf
[3] http://www.terena.org/activities/tf-noc/prep/programme.html
[4] 
http://www.tmforum.org/DocumentsBusiness/BusinessProcessFramework/35431/article.html

Best regards
Stefan

On 2010-07-16 20:34, Kasper Adel wrote:
> Thanks for all the people that replied off list, asking me to send them
> responses i will get.
>
> I got nothing other than :
> http://www.nanog.org/meetings/nanog24/abstracts.php?pt=OTM1Jm5hbm9nMjQ=&nm=nanog24
> and
>
> Network Management-  Accounting and Performance Strategies - Just the first
> three chapters
>
> Which is useful but i am looking for more stuff from the best people that
> run the best NOCs in the world.
>
> So i'm throwing this out again.
>
> I am looking for pointers, suggestions, URLs, documents, donations on what a
> professional NOC would have on the below topics:
>
> 1) Briefly, how they handle their own tickets with vendors or internal
> 2) How they create a learning environment for their people (Documenting
> Syslog, lessons learned from problems...etc)
> 3) Shift to Shift hand over procedures
> 4) Manual tests  they start their day with and what they automate (common
> stuff)
> 5) Change management best practices and working with operations/engineering
> when a change will be implemented
>
> Should i be looking for ITIL stuff or its not any good?
>
> Thanks,
> Kim
>
> On Wed, Jul 14, 2010 at 8:24 PM, Kasper Adel<karim.adel at gmail.com>  wrote:
>
>> Hello Everyone,
>>
>> I am currently working on building a NOC so i'm looking for
>> materials/pointers to Best Practices documented out there.
>>
>> On the top of my head are things like:
>>
>> 1) Documenting Incidents and handling them
>> 2) Documenting Syslog messages
>> 3) Documenting Vendor Software Bugs
>> 4) Shift to Shift Hand over procedures
>> 5) Commonly used scripts for monitoring
>> 6) Frequently testing High Availability
>> 7) Capturing config changes.
>> ....etc
>>
>> I can see that this is years of experience but i am wondering if any of
>> this was captured some where.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Kim
>>