What's your experience like working at a NOC?

There's a 3rd shift tier 2 NOC technician that I'm interested in and want to apply for.
My question is, what's it like working at a NOC? How about the 3rd shift? I mean, is there much to do on a 3rd shift, and what are some of the general duties?

Thanks TE

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Comments

networker050184

All NOCs are different really. What type of NOC is this?

From my experience third shift will probably be the busiest time in the NOC. That is when the maintenance is performed. If its a large ISP NOC there will be many things going on over night and much less during the day.

hbk

It's a NOC for a banking company. Some of the things they are asking for are things like hardware upgrades (circuits, interface moduals) network monitoring, maintenance for local, off-site and remote locations, understanding of some of the WAN protocols like ATM, MPLS, DS1, OC-n, etc..
So pretty much all over the board.

Lamplight

I work for a MSP where we support all Network/Voice issues for a lot of companies. We have Tier 1's that take calls, Tier 2's that work on more complex issues, and the IE's.

Third shift here is really slow and lots of free time. But it could be different in other NOC's.

Day time is kind of chill too unless sh!t hits the fan.

hbk

Lamplight wrote: »

Day time is kind of chill too unless sh!t hits the fan.

Lol, wouldn't be pleasant.
The one I'm applying to, they're upgrading alot of their hardware/software within their infrastructure, so this position might not be as slow.

kurosaki00

Depends on the NOC

Where I used to work we had a noc and they made tickets, calls, monitoring, but no troubleshooting what so ever and no login into the hardware.

Now I work in a NOC and is extremely busy every day
We do first level of support for certain networks, like make sure they try certain things before passing the ticket to an engineer
we get into the routers and switches with user exec mode

I say depending on the NOC but I'm very happy with my job. The pay is not the best but I'm learning so much about networks (BGP, circuits, MPLS, WAN, ISIS and more). Now one thing is for sure, you must have the need for speed!
A NOC is a place for multitasking and speed, you will have time to understand things but these qualities should already be part of you.

hbk

Kurosaki, thanks for the advice!!
Just started and it seems like A LOT of learning. We're learning everything from the internal infrastructure to how to use the remedy ticketing system. It's quite overwhelming actually because I'm new to a NOC environment so some of these terms that I'm learning are foreign, but I hope the transition becomes easier by the day

nerdydad

The NOC can be as easy or hard as you want to make it, depending on management. The NOC I worked at, we had some employees that were just ticket jockeys, and others that actually troubleshot issues. Whenever the proverbial sh1t hit the fan, I would stay late in the morning and work with the core engineers in order to learn from them, this was probably my favorite thing about 3rd shift in the NOC, oh, and when it's slow you can study.

One thing you have to remember in a NOC though; T1's don't like rain!

chmod

Where i used to work they have a noc is for a SP(3g network, internet service) and the NOC guys had a lot of things to do in the early shifts and had an easy ride at nights, because most of the traffic obviously was during the afternoon and that is when the problem used to arise. During maintenance they used to alert the customer and take a nap until we said it was done.

Mike-Mike

The NOC I am in is rather entry level, but it's super slow at night. We monitor multiple clients and some of them just dont want to be bothered at night so they turn off some of their alarms..

3rd shift is super easy, but too easy, makes you lazy