Network Operations Center

iLAN’s NOC Philosophy

In creating the iLAN Network Operations Center, we emulated how a corporation’s financial advisor, a big-six accounting firm for example, helps a corporation manage it's financial assets.

First, the financial consultant sets up the financial reporting structure of the corporation and monitors its operation to insure comprehensive “quality data”. In the network world, iLAN uses NetVoyant as it’s primary data collector. 

Second, the financial consultants provide appropriate company management reports that allow management to understand the current financial health of the company. In the network world an iLAN consultant evaluates the wealth of quality data that NetVoyant collects and creates a monthly report for management. To support the evaluation the consultant can choose among the many, easily understandable, NetVoyant reports to communicate that the consultant's evaluation is based on data, not fiction.

Third, the financial consultant makes recommendations to management concerning financial strategies that will help the corporation reach its business goals. In the network world, an iLAN consultant models and simulates the corporation’s network as it would appear in the future with additional employees and/or applications. The consultant uses NetVoyant data as well as data from other monitoring tools to create a network simulation based on “quality data”.

Application Monitoring

The iLAN NOC monitors and baselines the entire network including client-server applications. Agents, placed strategically throughout the organization, report the hourly response time of mission-critical applications such as database, mail and web e-commerce applications. Further, application response time can be characterized as network, server or application components. Additionally, iLAN consultants can monitor an application prior to rollout and predict response time under various network conditions.

Troubleshooting Starting Point

From a troubleshooting point-of-view, what NetVoyant does is create a baseline of how the network normally performs. When a problem occurs, iLAN technicians will see an immediate change in network performance that will alert the NOC to a problem and localize that problem to a particular area of the network.

Armed with this data, the iLAN NOC technician can quickly identify a network outage and notify the appropriate organization for remedial action. iLAN’s strategy of “out-of-band” network management, for example, allows the NOC to quickly prove to a telco help desk that a WAN link is, indeed, not performing (This avoids the common “It’s not our problem” response of the telco.)

For relatively complicated problems (or network modeling and/or simulations) iLAN can then employ Distributed Sniffers, Fluke LANmeters and other sophisticated network tools.

The iLAN Network Operations Center uses NetVoyant as it's centerpiece tool. We are the first NOC to employ this “state-of-the-art” tool in a commercially available venue. 

Try Before You Buy

Many corporations are considering employing sophisticated network management tools in their in-house operations and should be considering NetVoyant. For this reason, iLAN offers NetVoyant as a monthly service. In advance of purchase, corporations considering purchasing NetVoyant can use this service on their own network as a means to evaluate the software. In the hands of iLAN's expert technicians, their network will be baselined with the data made available to help solve real problems.

iLAN considers this rental approach far superior to the typical “30 day evaluation” used in most software sales. To properly evaluate a network-monitoring tool, its usefulness must be established after the corporation’s technicians are trained and knowledgeable in the product. This will take much longer than 30 days. Accordingly, using iLAN’s NOC service prior to purchasing NetVoyant will allow your technicians to learn from experts in network monitoring and troubleshooting. iLAN technicians will freely do “technology transfer” to in-house technicians during the NOC service period. This allows your technicians to learn from true network consultants. And data accumulated will be transferred to an in-house installation following purchase.

For further information contact Sales, phone 626.304.9021 x240