Pacific NorthWest GigaPop November 29, 2007

04/21/23 How to Build a NOC

Pacific NorthWest GigaPop

November 29, 2007

How to Build a NOC


Key Elements to Building a NOC

• Identify Customers– Who are your customers?

• Understand Customer Expectations– What are your user expectations? – SLA’s?

• Support Service Offerings– Besides networking, what other services are

being offered?



• Monitor and Troubleshoot Service Issues– How large and complex is your network– What level troubleshooting and/or monitoring

will your NOC do?– How will you communicate outages and

planned work to customers?


• Determine Appropriate Staffing Levels– What will be the service hours?

• Not all NOCs need to be 7x24x365• What about holidays? Weekends? On-call?

– Do your SLA's require in-person staffing?– Do you have after hours service response

requirements?– What level of staff needs to be present, and when?– What will be the means of responding to issues

when NOC is not staffed 24x7?



• Organizational Structure– What staffing tiers/hierarchy will you have for

support? Techs? Leads? NEs?– What will be your escalation practices and

policies? – To what group does the NOC report?– What other groups report there, and what is your

organizational relationship to other key groups?– Who will write and update procedures, training

manuals, etc.?



• Location and Design of NOC Facility– How much space do you need?– What is your facility like?

– How do you want to arrange your staff? Separate offices? "War room"?

• NOC Funding– How will your organization be funded?



• NOC Tools– How will you track customer information?

(Database needs, CRM?)– How will you monitor and troubleshoot?

Tools, specifically.– Are you writing any of your own tools?– Who will maintain your applications?– How will you track trouble tickets?



• Reporting– What reports will you issue? – How will you measure the data?



NOC Evolution

• What factors may determine operational changes for your organization - new services, expanded hours, increased number of customers, new equipment types, deeper skill level


October 3, 2007

Building a NOCPacific NorthWest GigaPop

Case Study


Customers and Expectations

• Our customers are in the Pacific Northwest and Pacific Rim.

• We track customer information in a database designed and maintained locally.

• Time zones have driven our need for 7x24.

• We cover 15 time zones which also makes scheduling planned maintenance difficult.



• Escalation policies also drive our need for on-call schedules and on-site personnel.

• Our customers expect 48 hours notice prior to work, unless it is an emergency.

• Outages are communicated via an application we have built locally.

• We also want to know when our customers have planned work.



• Expectations are included in the contract and located on the PNWGP web page.

• We prefer to have the NOC as the primary customer contact point for our organization in order to maintain quality of service when a ticket moves between groups.


Supported Services

• In addition to network monitoring for PNWGP, our NOC monitors:

• UW campus connectivity, including two hospitals (both layer 2 and layer 3, and wired as well as wireless, many UPSs),

• Approximately 500 sites throughout WA state for the K-20 network,

• Pacific Wave, and Transit Rail.


Supported Services

• We do not do any host, server, or customer application monitoring.

• We do not do desktop support.

• We do not reset passwords or arrange services such as email and web.

• We do not monitor data center security alarms such as for fire or flood.


Monitoring and Troubleshooting

PNWGP: approx. 20 customers, 5 node sites, MPLS, BGP, VPN

Campus: 115,000 connected devices, ~100 remote locations, ~7,000 wireless APs, ~4,000 layer 2 switches, ~150 routers.



Over 450 Washington state K-20 sites monitored.

Transit Rail, approx. 5 node sites,BGP and ISIS status.



PNWGP troubleshoots with the customer on routing problems, latency, and loss of connectivity.

IS-IS and IGP status is monitored. We manage DWDM, Sonet, and MPLS

circuits. Complexity is increased with escalation

paths being different depending on what isn’t working.



Outages and planned events are sent via email announcement in a standard format.

We include the date/time of the work or when the outage began.

If the customer’s connectivity is entirely down, we also call or page them.

Updates are sent at predefined intervals for large events, or when we have a change in status.


Staffing

• We are 7x24 with full-time staff. • Weekends we only have one person

covering each day, so vacations and sick time are problems.

• Holidays are covered by on-site and on-call staff.

• On-call consists of a 7-day period and rotates among all NOC staff on a regular schedule.


Staffing

• Tier 1 are student staff, also called Network Analysts.

• Tier 2 are full-time staff, most are titled Network Specialists.

• Tier 3 are full-time staff, titled Network Engineers.


Staffing

• We advertise to all customers an on-site 7x24 staff for immediate response to outages.

• Our SLAs indicate when a problem should be escalated beyond the oncall staff to a manager, director, and higher at any time of the day or week.


Staffing

• Day shift M-F requires that we have engineers (Tier 3) staff in the building.

• Off-hours we have Tier 2 staff always present in the building. They will escalate as necessary, either due to outage severity or complexity, or at a customer’s request.


Staffing

• To maximize staffing efficiencies, 2nd and 3rd shift personnel report to Computer Operations managers, rather than the NOC manager.

• These staff provide all of the same support and have the same training/access as the daytime Tier 2 staff in the NOC.


Staffing

• We have on-call lists with a primary and secondary person for backup when NOC staff is not on-site.

• A separate call list exists for escalation to managers.

• Engineering and other service groups are also available on-call 7x24x365.


Organizational Structure

• PNWGP has recently adopted a tiered approach for staffing.

• NOC Network Engineers are available after 6pm M-F and weekends only via on-call.

• One manager, reporting to the Director of Operations.



• Our escalation practices and policies are based on length or severity of outage.

• At predetermined intervals additional management levels are notified of severe outages in order to help with escalation at other organizations (telcos), or to keep peers updated at the affected sites.



• Many people in the NOC work to provide and update training materials; SMEs write procedures.

• We use a wiki to maintain our documentation.

• We were able to have a tech writing expert give us training on writing effective procedural documents and re-organize our wiki.


NOC Location

• Currently, our NOC has some single-occupant offices and some multiple (2-3). We are all on the same floor.

• We find that being located near the Network Engineering team is quite helpful for urgent escalations.

• Next year we will be moving into a new location and we do not yet have details on what that will look like.


NOC Location

• Consider lighting and noise control with shared offices.

• How many monitors will each person need? Will you use a large central monitor for some things?

• Provide an impromptu meeting space for collaboration on big events.


NOC Location

• Conference bridges greatly enhance collaboration across geographic distances whether working on outages or events.


NOC Funding

• UW funding comes primarily from the state tax payers of Washington,and UW Medical Centers.

• Funding also comes from the PNWGP and customers and WA state K-20 network.

• If you recharge you will need a business and billing model.

• Or will you use time and materials?


Tools

• A very useful tool is live chat or IM for coordinating efforts no matter where your office is.

• Our customer information is tracked in a home-grown database which has grown and morphed over a dozen years.

• New needs such as SLAs and layer 1 info now require significant investment in upgrades.


Tools

• Our monitoring system – surprise – is also “homegrown”.

• We monitor interface state and IP reachability; performance and protocol state connectivity will soon be integrated into our “event system” (NMS)

• Automated tools can page the appropriate group to notify them of outages or threshold conditions.


Tools

• We have a separate Tools team (with 10 staff members) who design, write, implement, and maintain tools.

• This allows us to have full-featured and robust tools.

• One trade-off is fewer “one-off” tools for specific or isolated issues.


Tools

• PNWGP uses Request Tracker, RT, an open-source application to track trouble tickets.

• Weekly reports are generated for our Directors by sector, severity, and type.

• Monthly reports are generated by sector for billing purposes.


Reporting

• Key metrics we track include: 1. Ticket numbers by sector for billing

2. Phone call volumes

3. Duration of outages

4. Root Cause Analysis for high-impact events

• Outage time is measured by duration of the customer impact.

• After Action Review and Follow-up is conducted for serious events.


Reporting

• Monthly report is emailed to the customer for traffic sent to/from their site.

• Our internal reporting includes “operational impacts” to groups under our main organization.

• How do you measure your NOC’s success? Response times? Reduced calls?


NOC Evolution

• Factors that have determined operational changes for our organization have been increased size, complexity and number of networks monitored;

• Need to respond to outages 24 hours/day with on-site personnel rather than paging;

• Skill and responsibility levels have increased significantly, and continue to do so.

Documents

Pacific NorthWest GigaPop November 29, 2007