SIG-NOC Tools Survey 2023

4th SIG-NOC Tools Survey Results

The Special Interest Group – Network Operations Centres (SIG-NOC) is a community effort initiated by the National Research and Education Network organisations (NRENs) gathered under the GÉANT Association. SIG-NOC is an open forum where experts from the GÉANT Community and beyond exchange information, knowledge, ideas and best practices about specific technical or other areas of business relevant to the research and education networking community. SIG-NOC is the successor of the former TERENA Task Force on NOCs (TF-NOC).

This is the fourth survey run by the SIG-NOC community (formerly TF-NOC) to gather updated useful information around the software tools that NOCs use to operate networks and services. It was collected in October 2023 and it had 37 sections, that covered 17 functions that NOCs feel responsible for:

Monitoring
Problem Management
Ticketing
Knowledge Management and Documentation
Reporting and Statistics
Communication, Coordination and Chat
Configuration Management and Backup
Performance Management
Inventory Management
Resources Management
Out-of-band Access Management
Change Management
Training
Security Management
Data Aggregation, Representation, Visualisation
DDoS Mitigation
Orchestration, Automation and Virtualisation

There was also one section dedicated to the adoption of standards and industry best practices. From the responses to the survey, 64 of them were reliable and detailed enough to be analysed.

The SIG-NOC team has built the 2023 SIG-NOC Tools Survey Report to summarise the results of the survey and the 2023 Tools Matrix , that contains the number and the institutions that use each tool for each function.

The anonymised survey data is also available in MS Excel format (i.e. raw data and zoomable graphs) for further analysis.

As the evolution of the NOCs has involved new responsibilities, new functions have been incorporated to the survey in every release. This 2023 survey, with 17 functions, incorporated Training for the first time. The third survey, published in 2019, incorporated 'Orchestration, Automation and Virtualisation'. The second survey, published by SIG-NOC in 2016, included 'DDoS Mitigation', covering 15 functions, and the first survey, completed and published by the TF-NOC in December 2011, contained questions about tools for 14 functions and also about taxonomy, network, services and best practices.

You can find the four reports below. Download the latest report in PDF.