Managed network

The network is the part of your environment that you only notice when it breaks. Most managed services providers treat it that way: ping-once-a-minute heartbeats, an alert queue that fills up with noise, a tier-1 dispatcher who reads from a script when something does go wrong. We do not run that way. Network operations at 4th Octet is an engineering practice run by people who have designed, deployed, and operated network fabrics in healthcare facilities where uptime is patient safety, financial environments where milliseconds are revenue, and global enterprises where the topology is the company.

What you get is not a dashboard with green checkmarks. It is a continuously-engineered network with a principal engineer watching it, ready to make decisions.

What you get

The recurring practice covers the operational lifecycle of your network, from “is it up right now” to “is it the right network for next year”:

• 24/7 telemetry-driven monitoring of every managed device, with flow-level visibility from sFlow-RT, SNMP polling for interface and platform health, and syslog correlation for events that span devices.
• Structured change management for every touch on production configuration. Peer-reviewed for non-trivial changes. Pre-change config snapshot to git via Oxidized. Planned window. Rollback plan documented before the work starts. Post-change validation as a first-class step.
• Carrier and vendor coordination including ticket ownership end-to-end, escalation through known contacts at the major Chicago-area carriers, and quarterly reviews of vendor performance against your SLAs.
• Configuration backup with diff history across every supported device. Want to know what changed on the core switch last Tuesday at 4:17pm? It is in git.
• Capacity reporting through the same Grafana tenant you have for observability. Real graphs of real interface utilization over time, link saturation events, and slow-growth trends that flag a capacity conversation before it becomes a fire.
• Quarterly architecture reviews that look beyond the operational layer. Is the topology still right for what the business is doing? Is the WAN sized for what is coming? Are there single points of failure that have crept in since the last design pass?
• Incident response with engineer-level decision-making, not script-following. When something breaks you talk to someone who can read the packet capture, not someone who can read a runbook step.

How we engage

Managed network operations is part of the Core managed services package for every client, with no premium for “network-included.” If networks are non-trivial in your environment, that is where most of the recurring engineering hours go, and the Core price reflects that as part of the per-user blended rate.

For organizations that are not ready for full managed services but need ongoing network operations support, we offer it as a credit-pack-backed retainer with a defined hours commitment per month. Pricing on that path is available on request via contact; credit-pack pricing inputs to the per-engagement scope generated in /quote/.

The stack, named

Our network practice is multi-vendor by design because real client environments are multi-vendor by reality. We hold meaningful depth across the platforms that matter in the SMB and mid-market:

• Cisco: Catalyst, Nexus, Meraki, ACI fabric. Brian holds enterprise-scale design experience in ACI/VXLAN/EVPN.
• Fortinet: FortiGate firewalls and FortiSwitch fabrics; SD-WAN where the use case fits.
• Palo Alto Networks: NGFW deployments and Panorama-managed estates.
• HPE Aruba: campus switching, wireless, ClearPass NAC.
• Dell Networking: S-series data-center switching (S5232F-ON and family); SONiC where the project is appropriate.
• Ubiquiti / MikroTik: smaller-footprint sites where the economics fit; we are not snobs about price-appropriate hardware.

Visibility comes from the open-source observability tier shared with our observability and platform practice: Grafana for dashboards, Mimir for metrics, Loki for logs, Alloy at the edge, Oxidized for configuration history, sFlow-RT for flow analysis.

Proof at scale

The same engineering practice runs at scales beyond the typical SMB. See the active/active disaster recovery build for a Chicago-area academic medical center: twelve months of design and build, 75 of 75 commissioning tests passed, sub-second failover on a multi-site DWDM fabric carrying clinical traffic. Cisco ACI Multi-Site, F5 multi-DC, synchronous storage replication, all named and validated.

Where this fits

Network engineering is also the practice where our professional services and managed services overlap most cleanly. Most managed network clients started with a scoped project, a data center redesign, a campus refresh, an SD-WAN migration, and continued into recurring operations on the network that came out of it. The team that designed it operates it. There is no handoff to a separate department, because there is no separate department.

If you have a network that you are tired of treating like a black box, start a conversation and we will look at it together.