With the covid19 situation, obviously lots of ISPs have their NOC personnel working from home, with VPN (or remote desktop) access to all the internal tools, VoIP at home, etc.
In the traditional sense, by “showpiece NOC” I mean a room designed for the purpose of having large situational awareness displays on a wall, network weathermaps and charts, alerting systems, composed of four or more big flat panel displays. Ideally configured to be actually useful for NOC purposes and also something impressive looking for customer tours.
To what extent potential customers find that sort of thing to be a signifier of seriousness on the part of an ISP, I suppose depends on what sort of customers they are, and their relative degree of technical sophistication.
Frankly, I think the days of the “showpiece NOC” being relevant ended a while before COVID. I worked at a Tier 1 for >10 years in a customer-facing capacity, largely dealing with “serious” enterprise customers. The number of customers who toured the NOC in that time was less than 5 (i.e much less than 1%), despite generally offering it up to new and quickly-scaling customers. I actually spent more time visiting customer NOCs over that time than I did my own with customers (and some of theirs were more impressive anyway).
Now, I did spend a lot of time coordinating calls between the NOC and customers, some of which was in the break-fix, mea culpa sort of vain, but also a lot of “spend time getting comfortable” types of conversations too, especially with customers considering their first service. So it wasn’t that folks didn’t care about what was going on there inasmuch as they recognized (quite rightfully IMO) that they weren’t going to get any value being there that they couldn’t get meeting the folks and learning about operational procedures, etc. over a conference call, so why waste the time/money to travel for that sort of thing?
I don’t know if I have a biased sample or if this is reflective of the norm these days, but the “NOC Tour” was something that didn’t get executed on very often.
I would not be surprised to see Cisco CTC (the alarm control panel/monitoring software for 15454s carrying TDM, SDH/SONET circuits) still being used in the year 2030 in some places.
We are still operating ours - 27 1080P projectors - but with a skeleton crew of just 3. Given the air volume, it’s almost like outside. Everyone else is WFH.
Frankly, I think the days of the "showpiece NOC" being relevant ended a while before COVID. I worked at a Tier 1 for >10 years in a customer-facing capacity, largely dealing with "serious" enterprise customers. The number of customers who toured the NOC in that time was less than 5 (i.e much less than 1%), despite generally offering it up to new and quickly-scaling customers. I actually spent more time visiting customer NOCs over that time than I did my own with customers (and some of theirs were more impressive anyway).
I just remember that, back in my BBN days (a LONG time ago), the various Defense Data Network NOCs, around the world, used to keep their big-screen monitors tuned to CNN.
It seems like the "something impressive looking" might just change. Add a bit of marketing copy about how "our monitoring is distributed, just like our servers" (or some more punchy variant) and show customers what the smaller monitoring stations WFH employees are using look like.
That is not to say that large monitoring rooms are a better choice over automation (which they are not).
I’m sure when the automation is perfect and widespread to the point that it catches and alerts on every network event, the monitoring rooms will disappear.
But unless you have an entire organization dedicated to automation development or pay an incredibly large sum of money for pre-built packages, the business decision may still be made to actively monitor the network with eyeballs.
Every failure mode is known until a new one pops up. Automation without any kind of ML secret sauce relies on known failure-modes.
Not advocating one or the other, just playing Devil’s advocate for the Devil’s advocate.
In the traditional sense, by "showpiece NOC" I mean a room designed for the
purpose of having large situational awareness displays on a wall, network
weathermaps and charts, alerting systems, composed of four or more big flat
panel displays. Ideally configured to be actually useful for NOC purposes
and also something impressive looking for customer tours.
though your message has a current date, its content seems to be at least
15 years old
In the traditional sense, by “showpiece NOC” I mean a room designed for the
purpose of having large situational awareness displays on a wall, network
weathermaps and charts, alerting systems, composed of four or more big flat
panel displays. Ideally configured to be actually useful for NOC purposes
and also something impressive looking for customer tours.
though your message has a current date, its content seems to be at least
15 years old
randy
The EDS Network Management Center, or IMS, had multiple large screens, shadow-free lighting, and lots of console positions and a visitor gallery with curtained window overlooking the operations room. We finished it right around 1990. Right when the suburban sprawl ws starting to hit Plano. After so much there during construction, I was taken aback when I realized I did not recognize the inside the building with it’s finished walls.
That implies “at least 15 years” could well be “30 years”
.
Perhaps I should have clarified: “from the perspective of persons who have the word “Sales” in their job titles, considered to be impressive looking for customer tours”
Nowadays, customers tend to care about you watching their circuit, and service.
Most still get surprised when they don't understand why the NOC never knew their circuit went down, and need help understanding the difference between monitoring the core, and monitoring customers who choose to purchase that service.
I remember working in the showpiece “Uncle Bernie” Ebbers had built in Ashburn, VA, for UUNET. You can even catch a glimpse of me in the American Greed episode dedicated to WorldCom’s downfall. I wonder just what that place looks like now. Since then, I have seen NOCs with multiple displays for multiple customers, but only designed to be useful to NOC staff, not prospective customers or executives looking for something pretty to watch.
