What is Network Operations? and Best Practices

In this article we are going to learn What is Network Operations?, Network operations refer to activities carried out by internal network personnel or by third parties that companies and service providers rely on to monitor, manage and respond to alerts about the availability and performance of their net. Personnel with the primary responsibility for network operations are often referred to as network operations analysts or network operations engineers.

A Network Operations Center, often called NOC (pronounced "knock"), is generally a the centralized location where network operations personnel provide supervision, monitoring and administration 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days of the year. 365 days a year, 365 days a week. This infrastructure environment can be located on the site and/or with a cloud provider.

Some key activities in the operation of the network are:

• Network monitoring
• Accident response
• Communication management (email, voice, and video)
• Performance, quality and optimization reports.
• Software/firmware installation, troubleshooting and updating network elements.
• Patch management
• Backup and archiving
• Firewall Management
• Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) and other tools and implementation and monitoring of security tools, in collaboration with Security Operations
• Threat analysis and explosion beam analysis in collaboration with security operations.

Challenges facing network operations

Due to the complexity of current networks and services, especially in light of the adoption of cloud-based infrastructure and SaaS applications, network operations personnel face many challenges, not only associated with a deep knowledge of the technology itself. , but maintaining simplified access to communications between all parties involved.

These are some of the main challenges related to the operation of the network:

• Lack of collaboration / coordination between teams.
• The rapid pace of change in the cloud and dynamic orchestration of resources means that documentation is generally not updated to solve problems
• Troubleshooting takes time, as it often correlates data between multiple devices and toolsets and requires manual processes to achieve reliable diagnostics
• Many different tools from different vendors used may require staff to work with different technologies, low-level utilities and command-line interfaces (CLI)
• Problems arise and then disappear when all the information for problem-solving is needed
• It is often necessary to scale leaders to assess the root causes

Network Operation Best Practices

Well-managed network management teams adopt a variety of proven best practices. These include, among others, the following:

• Constantly monitors a wide range of information and network systems, including communication circuits, cloud resources, LAN / WAN systems, routers, switches, firewalls and VoIP systems and application delivery.
• Provide a quick response to all accidents, failures and performance problems.
• Classification of problems that will be transmitted to the appropriate technical teams.
• Recognize, identify and prioritize incidents according to the corporate requirements of the clients, organizational policies and operational impact.
• Collect and review performance reports for various systems and communicate performance trends to senior technical staff to help them predict future problems or interruptions.
• Document all actions in accordance with standard corporate policies and procedures.
• Notify customers and third-party service providers of problems, interruptions and corrective actions.
• Collaborate with internal and external technical and service teams to create and/or update knowledge base articles.
• Perform basic system tests and operational activities (patch installation, network connectivity tests, script execution, etc.).
• Support for various technical teams in 24/7 operating environments with high availability requirements. Several shifts may include a day or night hours.

In this list of best practices, the staff is more likely to focus on network performance today than application availability. But the availability and performance of applications are essential to achieve the business objectives of companies and service providers. Moving applications to the cloud will be the main driver of network operations and will spend more time on the availability and performance of applications in the future. More specifically, network operations teams should ensure that internal and external networks and services do not impede the availability of the application, but speed up their delivery.

Network intelligence technology faces many challenges associated with the search for best NOC Solutions. To ensure optimal performance of the network and applications, network operations teams need detailed and accurate visibility of the network route, as well as routing and application layer data. For more information on how Network Intelligence can help network operations perform their functions, see the Network Intelligence page.