NOC as a Service · automated monitoring
NOC (network operations center) as a service from $695 per site per month: automated monitoring of the FortiGate, Cisco, Aruba, Arista and Meraki gear you already run, with a senior network engineer reading every actionable alert Mon–Fri, 8 AM–5 PM Pacific.
Track Record
We only do networks. That is not a limitation — it is why the outcomes are different.
Years of network-only practice. Architecture, security, and operations — not IT generalism.
Sites delivered. Healthcare clinics, law offices, financial branches, multi-site operations.
Design target for fully redundant builds with HA firewalls, diverse ISPs, and backed-up power.
Senior engineer–led. No junior handoffs. No ticket queue. No escalation chain.
Career aggregate. The 20+ years and 300+ sites span the operator’s full network-only practice, including prior-employer engagements. 99.99% availability, about 53 minutes of downtime per year, is an architecture design target for engagements that fund full redundancy. It is not a service guarantee or uptime SLA. Contracted response times and service levels are defined in each customer agreement.
Why Outsource the NOC
A true 24/7 NOC needs 6–8 full-time people to cover shifts, vacations and sick days. One night-shift technician cannot cover that. If your overnight alerts can wait until morning, you need automated monitoring and a senior engineer on the alerts that matter during business hours, for a fraction of six salaries. Monitoring only? See managed network monitoring.
The first human review comes from a senior network engineer, not a first-level dispatcher reading a runbook. During business hours, investigation starts from the alert context, not from you re-explaining the network.
Alert fatigue is how real issues get missed: false positives pile up and the noise wins. We tune alert thresholds to your environment’s actual baseline, suppress known-noisy patterns, and route by severity. When an alert fires, it’s actionable.
FortiGate, Cisco, Juniper, Aruba, Arista, Meraki, Palo Alto — we monitor what you have. The NOC stack is built on open standards (SNMP, NetFlow, syslog) wrapped with vendor-specific collectors where needed. Multi-vendor environments are the norm, not the exception.
LibreNMS, Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Oxidized — the same observability stack used by major engineering organizations and the one we run for ourselves. Battle-tested, vendor-neutral, transparent, and yours to keep if you ever bring monitoring in-house.
NOC Service Components
A managed NOC has four parts: monitoring, alerting, response, and reporting. Take all of it, or only the parts you need.
SNMP polling and synthetic checks across every site, every device, every link. Hardware health, interface utilization, BGP/OSPF state, wireless metrics, security telemetry. Automated polling records device and link status and sends alerts when configured thresholds are crossed. Human response is during business hours. When a site drops off the network, sites with an out-of-band console connection let us reach the firewall over cellular and see whether the fault is the circuit or the firewall.
Alert thresholds tuned to your environment’s baseline. Severity classification tied to business impact. Routing rules per severity (page, email, ticket, daily digest) and per time-of-day. Maintenance-window suppression. The alerts you get are the alerts you should act on.
Actionable critical alerts route to a senior network engineer during business hours. Outside business hours the alerts keep flowing, and an authorized contact can call us in for emergency work, billed by the hour. For multi-site environments, your point of contact holds context across the entire fleet rather than being site-specific.
For incidents that need a vendor case or multi-team response, during business hours we run the vendor case on hardware we manage, status updates and next steps, so your team is not left translating telemetry alone. ISP escalation (we open and chase the ticket) is included on Secure and up; on Essential you get the outage notice, and we run the escalation at $225/hr during business hours (30-minute minimum, then 15-minute increments) if you pre-authorize it or ask in writing. You don’t lose your morning to managing a firewall hardware RMA.
Live Grafana dashboards (read-only access for your team), a monthly network summary, the plan’s scheduled reviews from Edge Secure up, and configuration backups for every managed device, ready for your auditor. A full audit evidence pack is a separate add-on ($1,500 build + $150/month refresh). The reporting your CFO uses to justify the spend and your auditor uses to verify operational discipline.
The entry point is a Network Risk Assessment: what is monitored, what is not, where the gaps are, where the alert noise is. You get a written monitoring scope and a phased onboarding plan.
What Gets Monitored
Comprehensive coverage of devices, links, performance, and security telemetry — with the right collector for each signal type.
National scope. NOC operations are remote by design — that’s the entire point of the service. Client networks anywhere in the U.S. In Northern California? See the Sacramento Fortinet MSP and Fortinet MSP in San Francisco pages.
Our Approach
No mystery. No black box. Every step is documented, explained, and approved before execution.
A complete Network Risk Assessment of your current network, at a fixed price. Configurations reviewed, segmentation validated and gaps documented, in writing.
Address critical risks first, then build toward a standardized architecture. Every change documented, tested, and scheduled with a rollback plan.
Ongoing monitoring, documented changes and, from Edge Secure up, scheduled reviews. The network does not just work today — it evolves with your operations.
Your Engineer
For outsourced network operations, your senior engineer remains your point of contact across sites, with context on alert severity, escalation paths and response terms.
Background: Founder, ex-Meta. Past engagements include Cisco, Wells Fargo, Fannie Mae, and other Fortune 500 networks — the same caliber of engineering, now applied to mid-market organizations.
We are a Fortinet Engage Advocate partner and supply FortiGate, FortiSwitch and FortiAP. We also monitor and manage the Cisco, Aruba, Arista and other enterprise gear you already run. You don’t have to rip anything out to work with us.
Best Fit
The economics work best in environments where outages have real cost and internal NOC staffing isn’t justified by alert volume.
Organizations with more than one site where each site has unplanned-downtime cost (revenue, customer experience, compliance exposure). If that is you, see Fortinet MSP for multi-site networks (Multi-Site plan $2,495 plus $995 per additional site).
Multi-clinic healthcare operations where EHR uptime is patient-care critical. The NOC catches degradations early, routes real incidents to a named engineer, and produces the evidence a HIPAA audit asks for. Recurring medical plans run through your MSP; see the HIPAA managed network plan.
Networks supporting OT (operational technology) where downtime stops production lines or breaks logistics flow. Automated monitoring and a named engineer to escalate to are the minimum. We also keep the monitoring records an auditor asks for.
Growth-stage SaaS companies whose enterprise customers ask about uptime, monitoring posture, and incident response in security questionnaires. NOC-as-a-service produces the evidence those questionnaires want without forcing the build of an internal NOC.
Multi-location retail and hospitality where POS systems, payment networks, and customer Wi-Fi are revenue-critical. Outages directly translate to lost transactions. NOC monitoring catches issues early and supports defined store-level escalation.
Organizations with internal IT teams that handle day-to-day operations but lack network depth or monitoring coverage. We run the automated monitoring and take the escalations and the network work that sit above your team’s depth, during business hours. After hours the monitoring keeps running and your team can call us in for emergency work by the hour. Who handles what is written down before go-live. See co-managed network services.
FAQ
Covering every shift takes 6–8 full-time people. If overnight alerts can wait until business hours, automated monitoring plus a senior engineer on actionable alerts covers the need, and NOC as a service splits that cost across several clients.
Every plan includes automated monitoring and alerting. A human responds Mon–Fri, 8 AM–5 PM Pacific: next business day on Edge Essential, same business day on Secure and Compliance, as written in your plan agreement. Outside those hours the alerts keep firing, and an authorized contact can call for emergency work at the after-hours emergency rate. Response means we acknowledge the alert, investigate and start the fix. It is not a promise of final repair, carrier restoration, hardware replacement or uptime.
If your existing tool does the job, we layer the NOC on top of it rather than rip-and-replace. We’ve operated networks instrumented with PRTG, Auvik, SolarWinds, ManageEngine, Datadog, and others, and we wrap alerting and senior response around them. Where the tool itself is limiting, we’ll recommend (but not force) a migration.
The NOC fits alongside an internal IT team or general MSP. Communication paths defined up front: who handles what severity, what escalation looks like, how handoffs happen during incidents. The NOC’s job is to cover the monitoring and the network depth your internal team doesn’t have — not to replace them.
$695 per site per month on the Edge Essential plan: automated monitoring, human response next business day, config backup and a monthly summary, for up to 10 managed devices ($25 per device per month over that). No included hours; changes bill at $225/hr with a 30-minute minimum. Edge Secure ($1,295) and Edge Compliance ($1,795) add included hours and same-business-day response; Multi-Site is $2,495 plus $995 per additional site. See the services page for the full card. 12-, 24- or 36-month term; give notice in the first 90 days and leave 30 days later with no early-termination fee. Scope starts with a Network Risk Assessment.
Yes. Read-only access to Grafana dashboards for your IT team and operations leaders. Same dashboards we use for alert investigation. Plus a monthly network summary, alert digests, and the review your plan includes (a quarterly posture check on Secure, policy and access reviews on Compliance, a quarterly roadmap review on Multi-Site).
Start with an assessment
The Network Risk Assessment includes inventory of monitorable devices and links, recommendations on what to monitor (and what not to monitor — alert noise is its own problem), alert routing design, and a phased onboarding plan. From there, monitoring can ramp up site-by-site or fleet-wide. $3,500 for a single small site, prepaid, with part or all of it credited if you sign an Edge plan or Edge Firewall Managed within 60 days of the readout; larger networks are priced on the assessment pricing page, and you can read a sample report (PDF) first.
Response from a senior engineer within 1 business day.
A direct conversation — no sales team, no runaround.
An honest assessment of whether we are the right fit.
Clear next steps if we are — no pressure if we are not.
