3rd Week on the job in a NOC

I meant to make a post when I got the job but I just never got around to it. I recently left my last job doing linux tech support for point of sales systems for personal reasons and found my experience to be very marketable. I'm working for an ISP that provides wireless internet in rural areas. They just recently started a NOC and this week is the first week they've ever had 24x7 monitoring of their network. They have some 3550 and 3560 layer 3 cisco switches on the network but I don't have access to any of that yet.

When I do get access it will only be for running show commands and clearing the mac address table for awhile but it's still good experience nonetheless. So far I've had a lot of free time during the night shift but my manager gives me non mandatory busy work so I don't look like I'm doing nothing. He also left a couple of CCNA books and a book about bind 9 for studying. He teaches at a community college so he encourages learning. hopefully by the time I get my CCNA I'll at least be able to log in to a cisco router and see how it's configured to run on a production network. I could see myself staying at this company for a long time. The network engineers have been here for over 10 years so it must be a pretty decent company.

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Comments

StussyNz

Congrats. Sounds like an excellent oppurtunity! Keep us all informed of your progress!

nel

congrats on the job man. make sure you study as much as possible on those quiet nightshifts!

Mike-Mike

sounds pretty sweet, good luck, I start my first NOC job on Monday!

mapletune

wow, that sounds like a dream job to me!

Congrats~!!

W Stewart

Thanks. It really is a great job and it seems like a great company that's going to be growing in the future so I'm hoping at some point down the road I can maybe help a friend out who is trying to take that next step in his career as well. It's a pretty small NOC right now with two engineers and 3 techs including myself that are apart of the 24x7 rotation. I was told in the interview that since we're a small department right now that we would be doing a little bit of everything and as the company grows there will be more specialization. For the first couple of months it seems like our main focus is going to be on getting the monitoring part down. As far as everything else, we do some server monitoring and spam filtering right now and I have access to most of the other servers although I'm not going to touch anything just yet.

I already have prior linux experience and I believe that may have been one of the deciding factors in hiring me since it seems like the engineers are looking for a little assistance in some of the administration with the lamp servers and dns servers and whatnot. I just hope that by the time they end up acquiring a new site or something that I will be able to take part in the process. I also have a habit of overworking myself at times which can lead to burning out real fast but the extra free time will allow me to pace myself a little bit. Right now though I can't wait to get back to work.

JustFred

Sounds awesome, have a good time

FloOz

Nice! Looks like a great place to get some hands on networking experience. Congrats

Sponx

In your company what "Tier" is the NOC considered? I would love to get into a NOC type position but they are looked 'down' as a lower position.

Drovor

Congrats! Looks like a great position to help you in your future positions.

W Stewart wrote: »

I could see myself staying at this company for a long time. The network engineers have been here for over 10 years so it must be a pretty decent company.

Not to be a downer but just be cautious about this. I got a great NOC position and generous salary especially for my experience. Our team had a few guys with 10+ years in the same position and I too thought I would make a career out of it. Three years later, they outsourced the department and only myself and one other were offered a position to stay. I at least still have a job but ended up taking close to a 50% pay cut. Just make sure to get your experience/certificates and keep your options open. You never know what your employer might do to cut expenses.

shodown

Sponx wrote: »

In your company what "Tier" is the NOC considered? I would love to get into a NOC type position but they are looked 'down' as a lower position.

I know what you are saying by it being looked down upon, but also if you don't have the experience to move higher then you have to get in where you fit in. Not all NOC's as low level monitoring jobs. I've worked at NOC's like that before, and I've worked at NOC's where you have to know OSPF/BGP/MPLS to troubleshooting routing problems across the network. I've also worked in them where you T/S large call center's (10K users and up) and those were not considered lower level positions.

Sponx

I guess it depends what company you're working for, and what responsibilities they are. For my company they are a tier 1 support center... First line of response on major outages and issues... Second is service desk, and third is on hands support. From there it goes to on hands support assisting networking, telecom, and other branches of our teams.

shodown

it does. Tier 1 at cisco you usually get somebody solid and Tier 2 there will blow most enterprise sr network engineers out the water, but pretty much what I'm trying to say are Titles are just that titles. It depends on what you are actually doing in the roll like you said. I had a Tier 3 NOC position and my next job after that was a Lead Voice engineer so some NOC will set you up for greatness.

W Stewart

Sponx wrote: »

In your company what "Tier" is the NOC considered? I would love to get into a NOC type position but they are looked 'down' as a lower position.

I'm not sure. They have Tier 1-3 helpdesk and they do customer support but there's really only 3 of us in the NOC right now since they just started the NOC.

W Stewart

Drovor wrote: »

Congrats! Looks like a great position to help you in your future positions.

Not to be a downer but just be cautious about this. I got a great NOC position and generous salary especially for my experience. Our team had a few guys with 10+ years in the same position and I too thought I would make a career out of it. Three years later, they outsourced the department and only myself and one other were offered a position to stay. I at least still have a job but ended up taking close to a 50% pay cut. Just make sure to get your experience/certificates and keep your options open. You never know what your employer might do to cut expenses.

I'll keep that in mind. This is definitely not the end goal. I plan to continue studying and learning as much as I can in this role. I would like to move up within this company but I'm going to continue moving up regardless.

Mike-Mike

Drovor wrote: »

ended up taking close to a 50% pay cut. .

Why did you stay?

YesOffense

I'd love to get in some time in a NOC to get some experience

Drovor

Mike-Mike wrote: »

Why did you stay?

Didn't find another job so it was either stay or be unemployed. I've been applying to some positions and had some interviews but didn't land anything. Currently waiting for a response back on my last interview. Seems most positions are now 3-6 month contracts and didn't want to take the chance of being unemployed after a few months.

W Stewart

Yea I've seen a good amount of contracts job posting out there lately. I'm sure there are full time positions here and there but I've heard a lot of people say that they had to take that risk on a contract job to make that jump into the more advanced jobs. A guy who started working at Dell at the same time as me has been doing contract jobs since he left Dell. They all pay very well(around $40/hr) and they all seem to be sys admin type positions, they're just not permanent. But who knows, at the end of the day he may be better off for it. He's got some solid experience under his belt to get a full time position.

Drovor

I agree, I think I'll have to make the jump to a contract position to get the much needed experience and hopefully land a permanent job later on. With a family it is a big jump to take.

Back on topic, don't forgot to update us once and awhile. It is nice to see how you are progressing in the new position.

jamesp1983

Congrats! This sounds like a great opportunity to grow. Take advantage of the down time.

pert

I'm confused about something. What do you do in a NOC if you can't log into any gear, and even when you gain that privilege, only to run show commands? Do you just stare at dashboards from your NPM software and create tickets?

Even when I just started out I had full admin access to everything, we had change control procedures, but I never lacked access to perform any work.

Mike-Mike

Drovor wrote: »

I think I'll have to make the jump to a contract position to get the much needed experience and hopefully land a permanent job later on. With a family it is a big jump to take.

I have a wife and 3 kids, and I left a full time gig with benefits to come to this job which is Contract to Hire. It was scary, but I feel I'm making the right decision, and lucky for me my wife has faith in me.

W Stewart

pert wrote: »

I'm confused about something. What do you do in a NOC if you can't log into any gear, and even when you gain that privilege, only to run show commands? Do you just stare at dashboards from your NPM software and create tickets?

Even when I just started out I had full admin access to everything, we had change control procedures, but I never lacked access to perform any work.

We provide wireless microwave internet so right now I can log into the wireless APs the backhauls and the UPS to reboot the equipment or to look at any wireless or ethernet errors and uptime and things like that allthough I can get a lot of information from the monitoring software(we use orion). Right now most of my job is monitoring and dealing with spam and other email issues like ip address being blacklisted by our server but I have access to most of the other servers and The network engineer that does most of the web server and dns stuff has been teaching me how to do stuff as the need arises. I'm looking to do some of the webhosting tasks and pretty much anything server related to get some experience in that area. We don't really create tickets but we create bulletins about the outages so helpdesk can know if there is a power outage or if an AP is down when they start getting a ton of calls. I'm glad to finally not be the one to have to take those calls though. I have a lot of downtime so I think during the day time that free time can be filled learning server related tasks and studying during the night time when I'm alone.

Drovor

@Mike - I'm rooting for you to get hired permanently! My last interview was for a 6 month contract which I am still waiting to hear back. From what they told me it sounds like it would most likely be longer than the 6 months and at any time they could decide to hire permanently. If they offer me the position, I will accept it and hope it works out. If not, at least I have new experience to add to my resume. For my situation it seems like taking the jump is the only way to go.

Drovor

pert wrote: »

I'm confused about something. What do you do in a NOC if you can't log into any gear, and even when you gain that privilege, only to run show commands? Do you just stare at dashboards from your NPM software and create tickets?

Even when I just started out I had full admin access to everything, we had change control procedures, but I never lacked access to perform any work.

NOCs differ from place to place. Our NOC has a wide range of access although we are mostly a monitoring type NOC which handles basic tasks. It would be nice to be able to get more in depth experience but we don't which is another reason why I am looking for another position.

networker050184

pert wrote: »

I'm confused about something. What do you do in a NOC if you can't log into any gear, and even when you gain that privilege, only to run show commands? Do you just stare at dashboards from your NPM software and create tickets?

Even when I just started out I had full admin access to everything, we had change control procedures, but I never lacked access to perform any work.

It's just reckless behavior for a company to let low level people have a full run on the network. Most NOCs are for monitoring, problem diagnosis and escalating to the proper group. There is no need to reconfigure things for this function.

prtech

In our NOC, we have full access to devices belonging to our biggest contract. Close to a thousand routers and switches. We only alert the engineers to a problem when we don't know how to fix the issue, or we need them to dispatch. When we don't know how to fix the issue, they usually sit with us and teach us how to fix the issue so we could fix it ourselves later on.