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5 Tools to Help Virtualize Your Network Operations Center

Michael Procopio

With the adjustment to the new normal of remote work, IT Operations teams are struggling for a variety of reasons. One of the biggest problems is disrupted communications patterns. At the office, it's easy to ask a coworker a question. For most, their subject matter experts — who were a desk or two away — are no longer readily available. Organizations now face a lack of tools that can funnel information one place leaving an operator to view multiple IT operations tools on different systems.

To deal with this situation, businesses should start by virtualizing your Network Operations Center (NOC). Here are five tools that can help:

Group Chat Tool

Operations teams need to modify their processes to remain effective in a remote working environment. Issues that once required a quick walk over to the IT team now demands a chat or call.

There is also a lot of benefit in just hearing other people talk about something that you can add value too, which goes away when you are remote.

Person to person chat tools have been around since AOL, but group chat tools provide new functions that are particularly useful for IT teams.

Single Pane of Glass

A recent study by Enterprise Management Associates shows that, on average, IT Operations teams have 23 tools. When working at an operations center, moving between the screens of various tools, while inefficient, is not impossible. There is a lot of desk space for all those monitors or wall space for projection.

For example, I have two monitors in my home office, and could even do three, but not 23 (remember that's just the average). I can bring up more virtual windows but that is not always as efficient as separate monitors.

To avoid the need for 23 separate monitors, IT teams should integrate tools to be condensed into a "single pane of glass." This makes it easier for an operator to keep track of everything going on and ensures everyone sees the same data.

Correlation and Analytics

A follow on to the single pane of glass is bringing all alerts and metrics into a single tool that you can apply event analytics and AIOps to all data.

For example, integrating synthetic monitoring data with system and network data can link an application performance slowdown with a network or system problem that is causing an application performance problem.

ChatOps

ChatOps, in this context, is the ability of IT operations tools to communicate with humans via a group chat tool. A chatbot takes commands from the group chat software and passes it on to the IT operations tool, then takes the tool's response and puts it in the group chat. This improves staff efficiency by allowing anyone in the chat room to issue a command where everyone can see the results. ChatOps becomes the physical version of everyone standing behind you while you type commands and see results on your monitor.

IT Process Automation

Automating tasks provides multiple benefits. It reduces human error, speeds execution, and can roll back a change. With advanced orchestration tools, you can control access to the workflows representing each task and can provide an audit trail.

Automation has the added benefit of reducing costs. In fact, I've seen customers save upwards of $4M by adopting IT process automation.

In conclusion, while most of the discussion has been focused on tools, a change in processes or culture may be needed to make the most of them. For the current situation and with the prospect that this situation will repeat in the future, your operations teams need to be able to be virtual when necessary. If you haven't started virtualizing your NOC yet, the best places to start are group chats and a single pane of glass. Group chat gets communications as close to being in the office as possible. Consolidating as much information as possible in one place minimizes context switching, which disrupts focused thinking, increasing the amount of time to find and fix the problem.

Most disaster recovery plans never thought to account for the situation we are going through now, but given the current realities organizations still need to ensure their teams remain effective. The tools described here help increase the efficiency and quality of your operations, even if you never had to work at home before.

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5 Tools to Help Virtualize Your Network Operations Center

Michael Procopio

With the adjustment to the new normal of remote work, IT Operations teams are struggling for a variety of reasons. One of the biggest problems is disrupted communications patterns. At the office, it's easy to ask a coworker a question. For most, their subject matter experts — who were a desk or two away — are no longer readily available. Organizations now face a lack of tools that can funnel information one place leaving an operator to view multiple IT operations tools on different systems.

To deal with this situation, businesses should start by virtualizing your Network Operations Center (NOC). Here are five tools that can help:

Group Chat Tool

Operations teams need to modify their processes to remain effective in a remote working environment. Issues that once required a quick walk over to the IT team now demands a chat or call.

There is also a lot of benefit in just hearing other people talk about something that you can add value too, which goes away when you are remote.

Person to person chat tools have been around since AOL, but group chat tools provide new functions that are particularly useful for IT teams.

Single Pane of Glass

A recent study by Enterprise Management Associates shows that, on average, IT Operations teams have 23 tools. When working at an operations center, moving between the screens of various tools, while inefficient, is not impossible. There is a lot of desk space for all those monitors or wall space for projection.

For example, I have two monitors in my home office, and could even do three, but not 23 (remember that's just the average). I can bring up more virtual windows but that is not always as efficient as separate monitors.

To avoid the need for 23 separate monitors, IT teams should integrate tools to be condensed into a "single pane of glass." This makes it easier for an operator to keep track of everything going on and ensures everyone sees the same data.

Correlation and Analytics

A follow on to the single pane of glass is bringing all alerts and metrics into a single tool that you can apply event analytics and AIOps to all data.

For example, integrating synthetic monitoring data with system and network data can link an application performance slowdown with a network or system problem that is causing an application performance problem.

ChatOps

ChatOps, in this context, is the ability of IT operations tools to communicate with humans via a group chat tool. A chatbot takes commands from the group chat software and passes it on to the IT operations tool, then takes the tool's response and puts it in the group chat. This improves staff efficiency by allowing anyone in the chat room to issue a command where everyone can see the results. ChatOps becomes the physical version of everyone standing behind you while you type commands and see results on your monitor.

IT Process Automation

Automating tasks provides multiple benefits. It reduces human error, speeds execution, and can roll back a change. With advanced orchestration tools, you can control access to the workflows representing each task and can provide an audit trail.

Automation has the added benefit of reducing costs. In fact, I've seen customers save upwards of $4M by adopting IT process automation.

In conclusion, while most of the discussion has been focused on tools, a change in processes or culture may be needed to make the most of them. For the current situation and with the prospect that this situation will repeat in the future, your operations teams need to be able to be virtual when necessary. If you haven't started virtualizing your NOC yet, the best places to start are group chats and a single pane of glass. Group chat gets communications as close to being in the office as possible. Consolidating as much information as possible in one place minimizes context switching, which disrupts focused thinking, increasing the amount of time to find and fix the problem.

Most disaster recovery plans never thought to account for the situation we are going through now, but given the current realities organizations still need to ensure their teams remain effective. The tools described here help increase the efficiency and quality of your operations, even if you never had to work at home before.

Hot Topics

The Latest

Cloud adoption has accelerated, but backup strategies haven't always kept pace. Many organizations continue to rely on backup strategies that were either lifted directly from on-prem environments or use cloud-native tools in limited, DR-focused ways ... Eon uncovered a handful of critical gaps regarding how organizations approach cloud backup. To capture these prevailing winds, we gathered insights from 150+ IT and cloud leaders at the recent Google Cloud Next conference, which we've compiled into the 2025 State of Cloud Data Backup ...

Private clouds are no longer playing catch-up, and public clouds are no longer the default as organizations recalibrate their cloud strategies, according to the Private Cloud Outlook 2025 report from Broadcom. More than half (53%) of survey respondents say private cloud is their top priority for deploying new workloads over the next three years, while 69% are considering workload repatriation from public to private cloud, with one-third having already done so ...

As organizations chase productivity gains from generative AI, teams are overwhelmingly focused on improving delivery speed (45%) over enhancing software quality (13%), according to the Quality Transformation Report from Tricentis ...

Back in March of this year ... MongoDB's stock price took a serious tumble ... In my opinion, it reflects a deeper structural issue in enterprise software economics altogether — vendor lock-in ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 15, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses Do-It-Yourself Network Automation ... 

Zero-day vulnerabilities — security flaws that are exploited before developers even know they exist — pose one of the greatest risks to modern organizations. Recently, such vulnerabilities have been discovered in well-known VPN systems like Ivanti and Fortinet, highlighting just how outdated these legacy technologies have become in defending against fast-evolving cyber threats ... To protect digital assets and remote workers in today's environment, companies need more than patchwork solutions. They need architecture that is secure by design ...

Traditional observability requires users to leap across different platforms or tools for metrics, logs, or traces and related issues manually, which is very time-consuming, so as to reasonably ascertain the root cause. Observability 2.0 fixes this by unifying all telemetry data, logs, metrics, and traces into a single, context-rich pipeline that flows into one smart platform. But this is far from just having a bunch of additional data; this data is actionable, predictive, and tied to revenue realization ...

64% of enterprise networking teams use internally developed software or scripts for network automation, but 61% of those teams spend six or more hours per week debugging and maintaining them, according to From Scripts to Platforms: Why Homegrown Tools Dominate Network Automation and How Vendors Can Help, my latest EMA report ...

Cloud computing has transformed how we build and scale software, but it has also quietly introduced one of the most persistent challenges in modern IT: cost visibility and control ... So why, after more than a decade of cloud adoption, are cloud costs still spiraling out of control? The answer lies not in tooling but in culture ...

CEOs are committed to advancing AI solutions across their organization even as they face challenges from accelerating technology adoption, according to the IBM CEO Study. The survey revealed that executive respondents expect the growth rate of AI investments to more than double in the next two years, and 61% confirm they are actively adopting AI agents today and preparing to implement them at scale ...

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