Zenith monitors and manages over 155,000 devices across 8500 customer sites for 1500 IT service providers. This is accomplished by a combination of people, infrastructure and systems to deliver a high-level of service quality.

People: Zenith organizes its network operations center by teams, headed by a team leader and a service delivery manager, with a team handling a certain number of partners creating a single point of contact and accountability. Besides the teams there is a server expert group with extensive expertise with applications such as Exchange, SQL Server, and Citrix (we support over 40 commercial applications). Lastly, there is a security research group that analyzes patches and determines which machines they are to be deployed to as well as keeping track of releases by antivirus vendors regarding updates and zero-day vulnerabilities.

Infrastructure: Zenith’s NOC is located in Mumbai, India in an 80,000 sq ft facility with redundant power sources and internet bandwidth from six different providers. The software and technology (SAAZ) that drives Zenith’s service is hosted at co-location facilities in Fremont, CA (Hurricane Electric) and Pittsburgh, PA (Expedient Communications). Security has been a key area of emphasis at Zenith with measures including but not limited to biometric access control, video surveillance and access control auditing.

Systems: Zenith has built a variety of technology and processes to provide a high level of proactive maintenance from its NOC. The first being the early warning system and pattern detection engine which is a database of 16,000 different error conditions with corresponding resolutions. When our software detects events from logs, performance counters, and registry values based on the database of such error conditions it automatically creates a ticket for the NOC engineer who will then take action based on the corresponding resolution and escalation matrix. Secondly, the NOC operations system automatically routes problems by engineers and has a SLA tracker which is used by the service managers to deliver timely service and to prevent issues from falling through the cracks. Engineers performing any troubleshooting or analysis follow a “playbook” that defines actions to be taken against different problems and anything falling outside of this playbook is immediately escalated to the server expert group for action. These systems have evolved over 3 years of providing service and are being constantly updated to improve the quality of service. All interaction with partners is via a ticketing system (using the ticketing system within the SAAZ software or Connectwise) except for emergency situations such as server down or disk failure issues where phone calls are made. This discipline minimizes the chance of an alert being missed or a problem not being addressed in time.