This is one of those “what do you think?” questions.
I work for a company that has the contract to maintain the network for a large local school system, which I manage. Part of this contract is to run a 24×7 Network Operations Center, where they log server outages and follow up on problem resolutions. To do this, they have several tools (OpenView, IP Sentry, etc) that watch the network, and all of this data is available to the customer.
I’ve recently noticed that there is a server running in our NOC that is running a piece of switch management software to watch all the switches on the network. When I asked my on-site supervisor, his response (paraphrased) was “Yeah, they’ve been running that for a month or so to watch the network. Don’t tell the customer.”
I’m a bit conflicted. Yes, the purpose of the NOC is to watch the network, but IMO the data that comes off the customer network should be available to the customer, or at the very least they should *know* that it’s being gathered.
What do you think?