3rd 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 third 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 between June and September 2019 and it had 35 sections, that covered 16 functions that NOCs feel responsible for:

  • Monitoring

  • Problem Management

  • Ticketing

  • Reporting and Statistics

  • Configuration Management and Backup

  • Knowledge Management and Documentation

  • Performance Management

  • Security Management

  • Inventory Management

  • Communication, Coordination and Chat

  • Out-of-band Access Management

  • Resources Management

  • Change Management

  • DDoS Mitigation

  • Data Aggregation, Representation, Visualisation

  • Orchestration, Automation and Virtualisation


There was also one section dedicated to the adoption of standards and industry best practices as well as training activities in the NOCs. From the responses to the survey, 63 of them were reliable and detailed enough to be analysed.

The SIG-NOC team has built the 2019 SIG-NOC Tools Survey Report to summarise the results of the survey and the 2019 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 2019 survey, with 16 functions, incorporated 'Orchestration, Automation and Virtualisation' for the first time. 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 three reports below. Download the latest report in PDF.



Download the 2019 Tools Matrix (you need to download it and not just preview it to see the content of the comments):