Not all companies can afford to set up a 24/7 NOC but still need to know as soon as any host of service stops functioning. By the same token, when something does go wrong, you need to be able to quickly find and identify broken components in your infrastructure.

Our Virtual NOC product enables you to do just that. A virtual NOC is a set of software tools that monitor, alert, chart and graph various metrics of your hosts and services and each installation is configured and tailored to your own infrastructure. The software can be installed on any commodity server or on remote hosts such as an Amazon EC2 instance.

All the tools use web based interfaces which we make available over a secure SSL-enabled web server.

A standard installation includes both email and SMS alerts.

Core NOC Components

A typical virtual NOC installation includes:

Nagios

Nagios is the cornerstone of any virtual NOC. It is the industry standard in monitoring and it allows one to configure hosts and services to monitor routinely using plugins, defines how to handle failures and allows for monitoring by email and / or SMS (or any other scriptable system such as by phone call with text to speech).

Nagios allows you to give each element a parent (or multiple) so that, for example, you won't receive alerts for your http and https services when your web server itself fails. Nagios has dashboards and overview screens allowing you to see the over all health of your infrastructure at a glace.

Smokeping

Smokeping is another essential element of any NOC, virtual or not. It is a latency (and packet loss) visualisation system. We use it to monitoring the responsivness of the networks we build as well as the services we set up (it can be used to monitor how quickly your web server answers requests as well as the latency across your network).

Cacti

Cacti is a network and server graphing solution. We use it to graph all aspects of your infrastructure such as network traffic on switch or server ports, disk usage, server load, CPU utilisation, active processes, network interface errors / discards / overruns, temperature, fan speed, and so forth.

This information is graphed and available over months and years and can be used to predict trends and to locate bottle necks.

Documentation System

We now also include a restructured text based documentation tool which makes documentation available and editable online but also mails encrypted copies to named recipients. This is very useful for maintaining and securely sharing operational documentation which is available when the system upon which it resides is offline.

Additional NOC Components

As well as the above and on a case by case basis, we will evaluate the appropriateness of other packages such as:

Munin

Munin is a networked resource monitoring tool similar to Cacti but has some nice additional components. We often install both side by side.

RANCID

RANCID monitors a router's (or more generally a device's) configuration, including software and hardware (cards, serial numbers, etc) and uses CVS (Concurrent Version System) or Subversion to maintain history of changes. We use it where we monitor network equipment and also email configuration changes as diffs to selected individuals.