• 07 June, 2025
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Why IT Operation and IT Security Metrics Matter in 2024

It’s a cool thing to sit at my desk, third coffee in hand, and think about the whole of 27 years or so in IT and cybersecurity. Began as a net admin in 93, putting everything from coax to the first voice/data muxes over PSTN lines. I’ve witnessed up close the wreck that was the Slammer worm in 2003, overwhelming network operations and security teams alike. Running PJ Networks now, I still get my hands dirty with NOC and SOC (and I just helped three banks with zero-trust upgrades — another story). And yeah, I was partying with the hardware hacking village at DefCon.

One thing hasn’t changed in all those years: Metrics matter. But not numbers just for the sake of vanity metrics or fancy dashboards — but real, actionable numbers that show you precisely how your IT operations and security posture are doing. Here’s where it gets interesting: you can’t improve that which you cannot measure. Here at PJ Networks, we keep our measurement metrics front and center to demonstrate our value, strengthen your IT resilience and ensure you get more than lip service.

Why IT Operation and IT Security Metrics Matter

Metrics aren’t just numbers. They are the narrative of your network’s health and your security’s robustness. When I was a network administrator facing the Slammer worm, we didn’t have cool analytics — just frantic logs and a lot of guesswork. Nowadays, it’s all been about precision. Good measures help keep us honest, and transparent. They guide clients to understand how we’re faring. And — perhaps most important of all — they help direct continuous improvement.

Imagine your IT environment like an old car. You don’t just want to know that it is running — you want to see the oil pressure, the engine temp, and the brake pads wearing down. That’s what metrics give us: a way to keep your IT stuff in good working order without having your stuff disappear into the void or be taken over by bad people.

Key NOC Metrics We Track

NOC (Network Operations Center) metrics concern themselves with just keeping your infrastructure humming. Here, in case you are feeling woefully behind, are some of the most essential ones we follow and freak out over:

• Uptime: Obvious, but the gold standard. Every now and then your servers and network are actually down? We if only at all strive for 99.999% because down time lubes business up.
• MTTR (Mean Time To Repair): When things break, how quickly can we fix them? Speed here can be the difference between a one-off blip and a costly shutdown.
• Network Latency: It’s not just a matter of up or down — it’s also about performance delays. Latency monitoring tells us where and when we need to address slowdowns.
• Ticket Volume & Resolution Rates: Just how many issues does it have to deal with? How many are solved on first contact? This are the kind of numbers that show how proactive and efficient we are in supporting.

Here, let me give you a little story. Last quarter, a customer’s network latency began crawling up near the threshold. Thanks to our monitoring, we caught that early. It was a misconfigured router update — and was fixed in less than 30 minutes. If you were not on their team no one else even knew there was a problem. That, my friends, is the incredible power of those NOC metrics in action.

Key SOC KPIs We Keep Track Of

Now, let’s look back to the SOC (Security Operations Center). With security, it’s not the uptime that matters here, but the ability to detect and respond to threats. Key SOC metrics PJ Networks monitors:

• MTTD (Mean Time To Detect): How quickly are we finding a threat? The sooner, the better, presumably.
• MTTC (Mean Time To Contain): After being discovered, how quickly can we restrict and contain the threat before it expands?
• Number of Incidents Prevented: Sort of a boast, but we do add up successful blocks. It is satisfying to know that we stopped ransomware or phishing attacks cold.
• False Positive Rate: Here’s a debatable one — I also don’t love products that inundate you with alerts that aren’t real problems (false positives). Too many false positives are a waste of everyone’s time. And at PJ Networks, we’re turning detection down, to minimize the false alarms, but catch the real bad guys.

This isn’t just theory. I recall recently assisting a medium-sized bank that was slammed by a phishing wave. Since our MTTD and MTTC metrics were concrete and rooted in actual processes, we were able to contain the attack before any real harm was done. From dicey to in charge — and the peace of mind? Priceless.

How Fortinet Tools Help with Reporting Across the Board

Alright, it’s about to get a bit geeky – Fortinet tools are a significant portion of how PJ Networks compiles, dissects, and presents this data. Love and skepticism—that’s my vibe on any AI-powered security thing, though Fortinet has always given me rock-solid, granular data.

Their level of integration over firewalls, switches, and end-point security means we can drag real-time data for both NOC and SOC. Not only are the dashboards flashy, they are customizable enough to emphasize key performance indicators (KPIs) — uptime to threat detections — at the device level.

The Security Fabric of Fortinet allows everything to speak with everything else so we have a comprehensive view. It’s as if you were running a smart, perfectly synchronized kitchen, every burner and oven constantly telling you about cooking times and temperatures, all of them working together to make that perfect meal. And if something is a little bit off, we’re getting an alert right away.

Their reporting tools also allow us to create customer-friendly summaries — no analytics jargon required. That is transparency and accountability but without your eyes glazing over.

Open, Honest and Always Striving to be Better at PJ Networks

Some navel-gazing: I was late in my career when I learned what to track and how to explain metrics to clients. I have learned the hard way: reports filled with jargon don’t help anyone. Ours at PJ Networks, however, is a little different.

We privilege transparency — clients see what’s happening, what it all means, and why it matters. We reduce complex metrics to lay people terms:

• Uptime: Your network is running open heart surgery on a patient 99.999% of the time.
• MTTR: We solve problems with the speed of an average bear (or bot).
• MTTD: We catch threat activity virtually the moment it attempts to slither in.

But this is not only about a show of numbers. These also drive ongoing improvement — you can teach each alert, each outage. via Fortinet’s intelligence, we modify rules for the firewall, thresholds for monitoring, and response plans for incidents.

And clients? They gain more than belief. They get control. They can craft IT budgets and security postures based on actual data, rather than marketing hype.

Quick Take

• Metrics = numbers and not only; they are telling the health of your IT.
• PJ Networks monitors the important NOC points : uptime, MTTR, latency, tickets.
• SOC KPIs are about detecting/containing fast and prevention in reality.
• Fortinet tools transform raw data into actionable insight and simple reports.

Transparency and continuous improvement are embedded into our process.

If you are not able to easily see these KPIs with your security provided — ask yourself why.

There you have it. After all these years, one thing does not change: your IT and security strength is only as strong as your ability to see what is going on. Metrics, in other words, aren’t just for the geeks anymore — they are your steering wheel, your temperature gauge and your map in the wild, wild world of cybersecurity.

At PJ Networks we don’t just give you uptime, or security promises we prove it with accurate data you can count on. And I’ll tell you, there’s nothing more exciting than channeling that uncertainty into confidence.

Want to talk more about how these metrics shake out IRL? I have stories from DefCon, banks, and many, many network war stories. Just touch base — over coffee, of course.