Workforce capacity planning for proactive troubleshooting in the Network Operations Center

Abstract

Modern data centers require that a Network Operations Center is continuously monitoring network health, desirably in order to take proactive action before potential trouble occurs. In this paper, we contribute to the capacity planning of the workforce in charge. To this end, we have extensively analyzed, with real-world data, behavioral changes in a large server population in a data center. Our findings allow classifying such behavioral changes, which may be indicative of potential trouble, into relevance regions using a ranking mechanism. Then, the proposed methodology allows, together with an estimation of the time to analyze, assessing the workforce necessary to proactively tackle the behavioral changes observed. We conclude with a case study from a working data center, including a hands-on implementation of a traffic analysis solution to detect such behavioral changes and an estimation of the needed workforce to analyze them. Our results show that between 4 and 5 network managers are an adequate number for handling behavioral-changes analysis in a large enterprise data center.