Well run network operations teams embrace a variety of tried-and-true best practices.
These include but are not limited to the following:
- Continuously monitoring a wide variety of information and network systems that include communications circuits, cloud resources, LAN/WAN systems, routers, switches, firewalls and VoIP systems and application delivery.
- Providing timely response to all incidents, outages and performance issues.
- Categorizing issues for escalation to appropriate technical teams.
- Recognizing, identifying and prioritizing incidents in accordance with customer business requirements, organizational policies and operational impact.
- Collecting and reviewing performance reports for various systems, and reporting trends in performance to senior technical personnel to help them predict future issues or outages.
- Documenting all actions in accordance with standard company policies and procedures.
- Notifying customer and third-party service providers of issues, outages and remediation status.
- Working with internal and external technical and service teams to create and/or update knowledge base articles.
- Performing basic systems testing and operational tasks (installation of patches, network connectivity testing, script execution, etc.).
- Supporting multiple technical teams in 24×7 operational environments with high uptime requirements. Varied shift schedules may include day or evening hours.
Out of this list of best practices, today’s staff is more likely to focus on network performance versus application availability. But application availability and performance is key to driving business goals for enterprises and service providers. The shift of applications to the cloud will be the key driver in network operations spending more time on application availability and performance going forward. Specifically, network operations teams will need to ensure internal and external networks and services do not impede application availability but instead accelerate its delivery.
Network Intelligence technology addresses many of the challenges associated with the pursuit of network operations best practices. To assure optimal network and application performance, network operations teams need detailed and accurate network path visibility, along with routing and application layer data. For more information on how Network Intelligence can help network operations fulfill their roles, explore the Network Intelligence page.
