What are the roles and responsibilities of a NOC technician?

A network operations center, or NOC (pronounced "knock"), is a centralized location where IT technicians directly support the efforts of remote management and monitoring software (RMM). NOC teams are widely used in the managed IT services space and represent an important service delivery factor for many managed service providers (MSPs).

These technical teams carefully monitor the endpoints they monitor and manage, independently resolve the problems that arise and take preventive measures to ensure that not many problems occur. The NOC teams are also heavily involved in high-level security actions and backup and disaster recovery (BDR) activities, ensuring 24x7x365 uptime for customers of an MSP.

What are the roles and responsibilities of a NOC technician?

NOC network engineer and technicians are responsible for monitoring the health, safety and capacity of the infrastructure in the customer's environment. They make decisions and adaptations to ensure optimal network performance and organizational productivity.

When an MSP action or intervention is required, NOC technicians can create alerts (or "tickets") that identify and classify the problem based on severity, alert type and other criteria. Depending on the relationship between NOC and MSP, technical teams can work together to resolve the problem (and identify its root cause to avoid future problems).

Technicians are classified according to "levels", which indicate the severity and difficulty of the problems they manage. The levels are numbered 1 (easier problems to solve, minor problems) and increase the capacity for more complicated IT problems. For example, in the event of a hardware failure, you can initially assign an alert to a level 1 technician. However, after further inspection, if the problem goes beyond the hardware failure, the ticket may have increased. to a level 2 or 3 technician.

NOC technicians constantly study anomalous network activities, make technical changes and can pool large resources, some of which only an internal IT service provider would rarely use to respond to emergency situations.