How to Build 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?

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

Building a NOC Karibu Telecoms Case Study

* Our customers are in the Tanzania, Iringa * We track customer information in a database designed and maintained locally. * Demand and Service have driven our need for 7x24.

* 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.

Karibu web page * Expectations are included in the contract and located on the Karibu web page. * * We prefer to have the NOC as the primary customer contact point for our organization in order to maintain quality of service and quality of experiennce when a ticket moves between groups.

* In addition to network monitoring for Karibu Telecoms, our NOC monitors: * Connectivity * Approximately 5000 sites throughout Iringa

 Karibu Telecoms troubleshoots with the customer on routing problems, latency, and loss of connectivity.  Node - Node 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 sms and 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 them.  Updates are sent at predefined intervals for large events, or when we have a change in status.

* 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.

* 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.

* 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 on call staff to a manager, director, and CEO at any time of the day or week.

* 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.

* 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.

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

* 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.

Habari * Our monitoring system – Habari – 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.

* We have a separate Tools team (with 5 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.

* Karibu Telecoms 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.

* 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.

* Monthly report is ed 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?

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