Required Practices for a Network Operations Center?

hayduke.com asks: "I've recently been assigned to a program that is designing a 'Network Operation Center (NOC)'. I started to look for books, online material and other sources to help define a baseline for the Services Level Agreement for our intended customers. Not having any customers yet we are trying to incorporate the design elements that will provide the best possible level of service to the largest number of customers. A search on my favorite search engine brings up a lot of articles that have companies boasting that they have been recognized for being 'Best Practice' leaders in their respective fields but there are no references as to what those practices are. As this will be a NOC (pro-active) as opposed to a Call Center (reactive), I would like to know what other people think that NOC should be at bare minimum or if there are 'standards' that all NOCs should be held to."

Comments

Contract someone who knows what they are doing

[walt-sjc]

Not a flame or anything, but seriously. Get someone who knows what the hell they are doing to do some consulting for you. There are lots of them on the market, and you can get them cheap. Hey, you plan to make money with this, right? Don't want to lose your ass? Then you need someone with experience. You woudn't start a business without consulting a lawyer and CPA would you? While you don't mention what experience YOU have, I'm assuming that you have SOME, but not much based on your questions.

If you are gonna provide an SLA, you want TECHNICAL advice and LEGAL advice. Most SLA's are actually toothless in real life. The lawyers give you enough outs that you will never have to pay up with most customers (a few have the talent to see through the crap and make changes to your contract to put teeth back in.) Even though lawyers are expensive, it pays for itself in the long run.

The advise on slashdot is going to be spotty at best, especially in the light that so many NOC's are run poorly. Without experience on hand, you will run into the SAME traps / problems that most NOC's with inexperienced leaders run into.

Well, here are a few things that you may need.
A TESTED disaster recovery plan for servers, network, power, and cooling.
A trouble ticket system customized for your needs usable by inside and out (internally generated tickets and customer generated tickets.)
A network monitoring / management system that tracks not only subsystem availability but performance and keeps a history.
A customer management system that can bring up EVERYTHING you need to know about a customer, their syetems, their people, notification proceedures, etc. (this is VERY non-trivial)
A change control system - what happened, who approved it, who did it, how long did it take, what did they do, how did they do it, when was it active, how do you revert, etc.

Sigh. Setting up a NOC correctly is one of the most difficult tasks in IT.

Take it from those who have done it

[darkuncle]

Sean Donelan wrote an excellent piece on requirements for various degrees of uptime in NOCs. It's not too specific, but it gives a good idea of the numbers involved.
Read it here.