NOC Overview
-
A network
operations center, or "NOC," is a centralized location where IT
technicians directly support remote management and monitoring software efforts.
NOC equipment is widely used in managed IT services and is a formidable service
delivery controller for many MSPs.
These
technical teams closely monitor the terminals they control and manage, solve
problems independently, and take preventive measures to prevent many issues
from occurring. NOC teams are also heavily involved in high-level security
actions and disaster recovery and backup (BDR) efforts, ensuring 24x7x365
availability to MSP customers.
Noc Tools –
Open-source
options are good, but you should know that the use of open-source monitoring
requires a high level of participation in the tool. Open source requires a
significant investment of time and resources to learn, install, configure and
use. Funds can be created using community support or an internal IT team. The
second consideration is security, which becomes a problem if your company
applies strict safety rules. Immediate custom corrections may not be available
unless it takes a long time to develop. Or, critical security issues may not be
discovered in the audit process.
Here are
the top five NOC Tools that you need to know about -
·
ICINGA2
·
NAGIOS CORE
·
CACTI
·
ZABBIX
·
NTOP
ICINGA2 -
Icinga 2
is an open-source monitoring system that checks the availability of your
network resources, informs users of faults and generates performance data for
reporting.
Scalable
and extensible, Icinga 2 can monitor large and complex environments across
multiple sites.
If you
already have NAGIOS clients in your systems, the migration is effortless. You
can continue using the same NAGIOS clients as Nagios NRPE, NSClient, etc.
Many companies
have been using NAGIOS for years and have now migrated to Icinga2.
NAGIOS CORE –
Nagios® is
one of the most popular and widely used free network monitoring tools. Network
administrators love Nagios because it does it all. What you do not have can be
built or built by the Nagios community.
There are
two versions of Nagios. Nagios Core is free and open-source, and Nagios XI is a
trading tool based on Nagios Core, but with additional features. Nagios is
popular because of its active development community and its support for
external plugins. You can create and use external add-ons as executable or
Perl® files and shell scripts to monitor and collect metrics for each hardware
and software used on a network.
There are
add-ons that provide a more straightforward and more efficient graphical user
interface, address many Core® limitations, and support features such as
automatic discovery, extended graphics, notification scaling, and more. Etc.
Nagios may be impressive for startups and companies that do not have enough IT
support staff, but it offers good monitoring powers. For support, users can
always get help from the Nagios community or opt for a Nagios Enterprise
support package. Quality NOC can provide support for the installation,
configuration, and development of new features to verify software and hardware.
If you
have time to invest in learning and mastering this tool, Nagios Core offers excellent
network monitoring capabilities.
CACTI –
Cacti® is
a network monitoring tool that allows you to collect data from virtually any
network element, including routing and switching systems, firewalls, load
balancers, and servers, and put them in the form of robust graphics. If you
have a device, it is possible that the active community of Cacti developers has
created a monitoring model for it.
Cacti support
SNMP search, which covers a wide range of network devices. You can also extend
the features of Cacti to use scripts, queries or commands for data collection
and save it as a template for other devices for similar data sets. Cacti harness
the power of RRDTool, an open-source graphics and data logging system that
stores consulted data in the database and created graphs from stored data sets.
RRDTool data consolidation allows you to store your data forever and is limited
only by the size of your storage. Cacti rely on RRDTool to generate any chart
for any data set. Cacti is the standard used by many commercial and open-source
tools. Plants also allow you to add multiple users and grant access to a NOC
device.
Many
add-ons, scripts, and templates can be used in this community. We especially
liked the device support and graphic features.
ZABBIX -
Zabbix is
probably the most used open-source network monitoring tool after Nagios.
Complex to
configure, Zabbix® comes with a clean and straightforward graphical user interface
that makes it easy to manage when you get used to it.
Zabbix
supports agent-free monitoring using technologies such as SNMP, ICMP, Telnet,
SSH, etc., as well as agent-based control for all distributions of the Linux®,
Windows®, and Solaris® operating system. It is compatible with several
databases, including MySQL®, PostgreSQL ™, SQLite, Oracle® and IBM® DB2®.
Zabbix VMware® features, which are considered the best function.
NTOP –
Ntop,
which is now ntopng (ng for the next generation), is a traffic probe that uses
libpcap (for packet capture) to signal network traffic.
You can
install ntopng on a server with multiple interfaces and use port doubling or a
network tap to enable ntopng with network data packets for analysis. ntopng can
analyze traffic even at 10G speeds; report on IP addresses, volume, and bytes
for each transaction; classify traffic based on IP address, port, and protocol;
Generate reports to use see the best speakers, and even report AS information.
This level of traffic analysis helps you make informed decisions about capacity
planning and QoS design, as well as finding users and applications that are
hogging bandwidth on your network. ntopng has a commercial version called
ntopng pro, which comes with some extra features, but the open-source version
is good enough to quickly get information about traffic behavior. Ntop can also
be integrated with external monitoring applications such as Nagios to alert and
provide data for monitoring.
