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I’ve been up to my knees in network trenches since ’93 when dial-up was king and the only worms we worried about were the ones wandering Microsoft’s shoddy patching. So fast forward a couple of decades later — having felt the bite of Slammer directly on the backside and now witnessing the NOC tech stack at PJ Networks, I’ve learned a bitter truth: your NOC tech stack is not merely IT infrastructure; it’s the spinal column of your organization’s security posture. Commit an error and you are toast. And the thing is that no two NOCs should look the same! The tech has to work with your needs, scale and yes, your … quirks.
For PJ Networks, our NOC is an evolving system that we have intentionally developed with scalability, security and real-time visibility in mind. Imagine, if you can, an layered defense matrix brought to life by Fortinet Firewalls and log analyzers, which runs well on sturdy Dell servers, with Zabbix as a watchful watchdog that barks when he runs on Ubuntu 22.04. Oh—and we’ve just added an NVIDIA L40S GPU to power AI-based analytics. The nerve center brings it all together with carefully choreographed SNMPv3 monitoring and automation workflows, ensuring we see a blip at a microsecond level before it expands.
Here’s the architecture diagram—picture the firewall and monitoring clusters, servers and GPU units all seamlessly integrated, along with on-the-fly customizable dashboards for various teams.
Gone are the days when the job of firewalls was to be dumb packet filters. These days, FortiGate serves as both our staunchest line of defense and a sentinel that is strategically placed to intercept threats before they breach the gates and reach valuable target assets. We leverage features like:
I’ve myself employed them in environments that were anything but simple — such as recently completed three major bank upgrade projects to transition to zero-trust and the flexibility of FortiGate was a life saver. And frankly, there is no firewall lineup that feels battle-toughened in the Indian NOC space. I’m a curmudgeon about buzzwords, but the Fortinet correlation engine is pretty great.
Drowning in logs? Yeah, I’ve been there. That said, this is where FortiAnalyzer comes in, because it collects, aggregates, and normalizes logs from all of our Fortinet gear. If you’d like to receive this briefing by email, sign up here An ounce of prevention Think of it as the black box recorder for your NOC: Without it, you’re flying blind.
Its deep analytics provide:
Not perfect — no tool can be — but this slashes incident response times. It’s also a critical cog in avoiding those late-night fire drills.
To know what is happening where, to troubleshoot outages or performance issues, and to have a ring-side seat as it were, Zabbix is the tool for the job. We operate a specialized appliance on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS–stability and security updates come naturally to us. Why Zabbix?
Put it in an appliance for less noise, easy upgrades, and a beefed-up alerting system. If you think tracking is “set and forget,” you haven’t done your homework. Our configs trade off granularity (read gross deep spnets) against alert fatigue.
I’ll be a broken record but— STOP using SNMPv1 or SNMPv2 in your NOC. SNMPv3 is not just encryption, it is also about authentication, authorization and integrity.
Here’s what we do:
Believe, after having to deal with sloppy SNMP deployments causing incidents (and yeah, embarrassment), this is non-negotiable in our stack.
And what’s a NOC without hardcore hardware? Our backend is powered by enterprise Dell servers customized for redundancy and speed. The specs matter:
Being a Dell shop is using the most reliable complement of gear that works well together, is well supported by the vendor (which is essential when you’re working with high-stakes clients).
Here’s what I think, a slightly controversial take: I’m suspicious of anything that’s marketed as AI-generated and promising magic. But drilling down on the L40S GPU from NVIDIA, I’m sold — the proof is in the pudding, combine muscle-bound hardware with robust models and there’s money there to be made.
Our L40S has a process doing AI driven anomaly detection, which takes offload the machine heavy lifting task such as:
It’s like having a turbocharged co-pilot looking over every packet much faster than any human — or traditional tool — can. That said, this is no magic bullet. It is only a powerful instrument in our larger arsenal.
Alert storms kill productivity. Our solution? A layered alerting strategy.
And, we are plugging real-time threat intel feeds into our alerting pipelines. This way,
You don’t hunt ghosts — you grapple with genuine issues.
We developed custom dashboards based on different personas — as NOC engineers, security analysts, IT architects — you name it. With the help of Zabbix API and FortiAnalyzer data feeds, we mingle metrics and logs to build real-time views of:
Pro tip: Invest some engineering cycles here. A good dashboard should make you feel like blinky filling up data, not something that is decorated. If your metrics aren’t actionable at a glance, you’ve wasted time.
Regular Benchmarking of our stack, to ensure no bottlenecks creep in, currently, a snapshot:
Scaling? Easy, thanks to modular design. Need more capacity? Scale out more Zabbix proxies or cluster FortiAnalyzer nodes. Hardware upgrades? Plug and play with Dell’s modular chassis The more things change, the more Dell’s MCSA technology stays the same!
Is AI the shape of things to come in NOC? Certainly not — but with a million ifs. At PJ Networks, on we go:
But here’s a bit of advice: don’t rush onto the AI bandwagon heedlessly. Combine human intuition with tech. AI is a tool, not a substitute.
Managing a NOC for PJ Networks is very much like driving a high performance race car: you must have the right combination of power, steering, and situation awareness. Our tech stack—Fortinet appliances, tight Zabbix monitoring on Ubuntu, Dell servers, NVIDIA AI accelerators—enables us to keep our edge.
Couple things to consider for the other network engineers and architects out there attempting to implement or redesign your NOC:
And yes—don’t skimp on coffee. You’ll need it.
Stay sharp out there. You should be confident with your NOC tech stack — not stuck with a different headache.
