Outsourced NOC

Hypntick

Anyone else have an outsourced NOC where they are? Specifically has anyone heard about or worked with Marfic? I am just wondering as that's who we've chosen to go with as a replacement for who we're currently with. Wanted to see if anyone had any experiences they could share. I won't say it can't get worse than what we've got, but I think almost anything is an improvement.

ptilsen

All I can say is moving our NOC to Zenith was a horrible decision. I don't know how Marfic is, but Zenith is really bad. Customer satisfaction from switching to full-time US-based employees (full-time work-from-home, but still US-based employees) went way up and costs actually went down.

Hypntick

We currently use NetEnrich, on-call is a nightmare with them watching things. I don't think a single one of them knows how to log into vsphere and check a server from that end. Regular 2-4 am calls in regards to not being able to log in to something. For example if the ISP drops for 2-3 minutes and they get the alert, we get a call 2 hours later saying they can't log in, when everything has been fine for hours and the "outage" was temporary. I've heard bad things about Zenith as well. Hopefully one day we'll go with US-based guys, but maybe i'm hoping for a bit much.

ptilsen

Zenith won't even do that. They literally just call and tell you something is down. If it's an entire site with ten servers, they will call you ten times -- usually ten different people, some of them simultaneously.

We replaced Zenith with two US-based helpdesk guys (along with our standard on-call rotation) and a monitoring system called Labtech. Labtech does everything Zenith did and more, but it's just a program.

the_Grinch

I worked for an MSP where I was part of the NOC team. The thing people need to remember is the software we use to monitor has a polling period (usually 5 minutes). So technically speaking, if your internet were to go down we wouldn't know until at the longest 5 minutes. Overall though, most people like the service and it does save a ton of money. Just know to ask questions: what software do you use? what are the polling intervals? what are your response times? what is the SLA? what are the terms of the SLA? what are your hours of operations? how many people are on each shift? how many customers do you currently have? The thing I always found funny was who was usually sent on NOC tours prior to an agreement being signed. Only once did I have a technical person from a company come for a tour and ask questions. Normally, it was some business user who was fooled by the big tv monitors on the wall filled with generally useless data.

We always had a NOC alert chart, weather map, and ticket volume display up. If the ticket volume looked like crap, adjust the total number and it was in the green. Too many NOC alerts? Filter them down so that there aren't as many. The business types would be in awe of these big monitors that none of the techs doing the work ever looked at. Also, in relation to how many people are on each shift, there is a reason to ask this. Where I was, from 8 pm to 6 am Monday to Friday I was the only guy. Friday to Monday 7 pm to 7 am there was only one guy. Of course people were on call, but I always found it somewhat dishonest to say "oh we have people on multiple shifts to cover you 24/7." Yeah we were 24/7, but 1 guy for 100 customers isn't a great ratio. Just some things to be aware of...

the_Grinch

We used Nable as our monitoring software and it was pretty good. As far as what we would do when something appeared down, it depended on the level of service. If you were monitoring only, if the circuit went down we would alert you and call it out. Servers go down, I would usually check to confirm I really couldn't get in and then call it out per the customers instructions. It truly comes down to what service level you have and how big the company is that you use.