Livecast Series: The Evolution of the Network Operations Center

There's truly nothing better than having complete visibility to all parts of IT, but it's not always an easy road. Now more than ever, a Network Operation Center is necessary and worth the investment. Join us for two 60-minute sessions where Kevin M. Sparenberg, Community Evangelist, will speak with Howard Williams, Jr., Manager of Information Technology, about his journey building a net-new Network Operations Center at SolarWinds.

They will discuss the challenges in creating your own NOC and where the SolarWinds Observability Center is headed. We'll show you how this tool can help lighten your load and allow your teams to focus on those big-picture projects and actually improve the business. 

Session One – November 17, 2022, 10 a.m. CT  

Making the Case for a Network Operations Center  
 
Let's kick off with the most elementary question of all: Why bother with a Network Operations Center? After all, your solution is bringing in your metrics and giving you alerts when things go awry: is there any tangible benefit from building a NOC?

After this session, you'll be able to…  

  • Know exactly where to find the resources necessary to make your case and get everyone involved in minimizing downtime.  
  • Have the discussion with your executive leadership about the importance of a Network Operations Center in your environment.  
  • Build partnerships within IT, allowing for lower mean-time-to-resolution.  
  • Understand the feedback loops necessary for internal IT teams and communicate the needs to your software vendor.  

Not every solution is suitable for every organization, but knowledge of some fundamentals can help steer your decision-making.

Session Two – December 15, 2022, 10 a.m. CT 

The NOC's Role in the Cloud-first Data Center 

Nowadays, organizations are leveraging public cloud providers to reduce the workload and costs inherent in traditional on-prem infrastructure models. This begs the question: Is a NOC essential, given that I don't own any of my infrastructures?  
 
In this session, we'll discuss…  

  • How to effectively compare the feature functionality of moving your infrastructure monitoring to the cloud.  
  • The conversations you should have with your leaders about maintaining the highest level of satisfaction with your tools.  
  • Approaching the application and system owners to gain cheerleaders and reduce naysayers.  
  • The standing meetings that the SolarWinds IT organization uses to address the needs of the consumers of this data.  

Whether your organization has just implemented a cloud-first methodology or you've been in the cloud since inception, there's a part of this conversation that'll help inform your future decisions. 

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