NOC Runbooks

The runbook is the single source of truth for everyone inside and outside the NOC. Whether you’re outsourcing support to us, running your own NOC, or white-labeling our NOC services to your customers, we supply all the information you need to make action clear and consistent.

people discussing runbooks

Overview Everything you need to know, all in one place

Poor documentation is the source of many problems throughout IT operations. Without formal processes and procedures, even highly-skilled professionals can struggle to achieve consistent desired results when outages occur.

Our NOC Runbooks thoroughly document and guide you through operational support processes. You get all the information you need to make NOC service effective and efficient, whether we’re handling support for you, or you’re taking it on in-house.

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Runbooks for NOC Clients

Our NOC clients receive a detailed handbook documenting all the work steps the NOC will execute for managing operations, troubleshooting, and escalations specific to their support service. While primarily an internal-facing document, you get full visibility into our processes and how our team and tools will interface with yours.

NOC Runbook Development

Have your own NOC but need a proper runbook? Need runbook support for your own customers? We deliver expert-driven runbook development as a professional service, too. We work closely with you to understand and document your processes (or your customers’ processes) into a single source of truth for everyone inside and outside your NOC.

NOC Runbook

Contents & Capabilities Inside your NOC Runbook

Our runbooks lay out the critical inputs that drive NOC service and provide step-by-step procedures for handling them, whether it’s a phone call, email, or an event-based notification. Our runbooks also describe the outcomes of these actions, both successful and unsuccessful, with clear escalation paths to other levels of support. These paths can direct action internally or to external third parties. In short, we ensure everything is fully documented and presented for clear, consistent action.

Infrastructure Documentation

All diagrams, supporting circuits and applications, server information, and other infrastructure details are laid out to show interrelations between infrastructure components and visualize support flows. We also document the connections between key alarms and the infrastructure to know when critical services may be being impacted.

Process Documentation

We lay out all procedural steps teams will take, whether it's answering the phone, collecting and documenting the right information about reported issues and incidents, or any other interaction or activity that will take place.

Links to Tools/Contacts/Data

We document and link all external tools and data that the NOC may need as part of issue resolution, as well as all internal and third-party contacts.

Alarm-to-Action Guide

We group together the top incident-generating alarms and ensure the process for resolution is clear. We often prioritize on the top 90% within the volume of alarms as most of these issues can be handled at Tier 1, lightening the load on advanced engineers.

"INOC combines end-to-end technical and operational expertise into an outstanding service package. They supported a complex optical network connecting multiple data centers with a level of organization and process efficiency that was impressive. Turnup was streamlined, painless, and transitioned smoothly into excellent ongoing 24x7x365 support.”

Digital Realty logo George J. Cornachini, Global Technology Consultant
Digital Realty

"INOC plays a critical role in protecting vital terrestrial and subsea networks that demand the very best in monitoring. To us, an issue left undetected can compound into a multi-million-dollar fix. INOC’s expertise and responsiveness have become indispensable for our clients who rely on these networks. Notifications are escalated exactly where they need to go and we can meet virtually any reporting demand our clients bring to us."

AquaComms logo Charles Cumming, Global VP of Operations
Aqua Comms

Dive into our resources

  • Get a clear and concise introduction to outsourced NOC support in our definitive guide.
  • Learn three factors to consider when deciding to outsource or not in our handy decision guide.
  • Learn the difference between NOC managed services and outsourced NOC support in our quick-guide.
  • Get an introduction to outsourced NOC staffing models in our staffing guide.
  • Take a look at our onboarding process and what to expect if you turn up support with us.
  • Learn the critical utilization metrics and KPIs NOCs often miss in our latest blog post.
  • Explore a few best practices in our guide to ITIL incident management.
  • Start improving MTTR and MTBF in your optical networks with our eight tips.
  • Get some unique perspectives on managing cloud infrastructure in our blog post.
  • Learn the difference between NOC managed services and outsourced NOC support in our quick-guide.
  • See how we helped AT&T Business grow its VA Hospital guest wi-fi program and reduce ticket resolution times by 35% in our case study.

  • Learn how INOC partnered with SDI Presence to reduce ticket volume by 50% and increase monitoring accuracy by 25% for critical infrastructure customers.

Get in touch

Have questions? Want to discuss a possible engagement? We’re here to help you find your optimal NOC solution.

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