Top 12 NOC Analyst Skills to Put on Your Resume
In the fast-evolving landscape of network operations, a NOC Analyst stands at the forefront of keeping services humming and systems steady. A resume that spotlights the right skills for the role helps you cut through the noise, showing you can monitor, manage, and resolve network issues with calm precision when things get messy.
NOC Analyst Skills
- Wireshark
- SolarWinds
- Nagios
- Splunk
- Cisco IOS
- Juniper Junos
- BGP (Border Gateway Protocol)
- MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching)
- SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol)
- PowerShell
- Linux
- VMware
1. Wireshark
Wireshark is a network protocol analyzer that captures and inspects live packets, giving NOC Analysts deep visibility for troubleshooting, analysis, and performance monitoring.
Why It's Important
It enables granular packet-level insight, which means faster root-cause analysis, better performance tuning, and clearer detection of suspicious traffic.
How to Improve Wireshark Skills
Build protocol fluency: Strengthen fundamentals (TCP handshake nuances, TLS negotiation, DNS behavior) so packet views tell immediate stories.
Master display filters: Create precise filters and save them; speed matters during incidents.
Use Expert Info: Let Wireshark flag anomalies, then dig into flows and conversations for context.
Lean on shortcuts and profiles: Custom columns, color rules, and keyboard shortcuts shave precious minutes.
TShark for automation: Script recurring captures, rotate files, and parse outputs for batch analysis.
Practice live: Reproduce issues in a lab, capture, annotate, repeat. Real muscle memory.
Consider certification: Programs like WCNA formalize skills and sharpen methodology.
Regular hands-on analysis turns packet noise into clear signals you can act on quickly.
How to Display Wireshark Skills on Your Resume
2. SolarWinds
SolarWinds delivers network and infrastructure monitoring tools used to watch availability, performance, and configuration at scale—core territory for NOC teams.
Why It's Important
It consolidates telemetry, alerting, and reporting, letting analysts spot problems early, isolate impact, and coordinate response fast.
How to Improve SolarWinds Skills
Tune what you monitor: Focus on critical devices, interfaces, and services. Classify by business impact to prioritize.
Refine alerts: Calibrate thresholds, leverage dependencies, and set escalation paths to reduce noise and catch the right signal.
Sharpen reporting: Build reports that show trends, SLAs, and capacity. Actionable, not ornamental.
Automate actions: Use the SolarWinds Platform’s automation to execute scripts on common faults—restart services, clear queues, toggle interfaces.
Harden and maintain: Keep the platform current, secure credentials, and right-size polling to avoid blind spots or overload.
Share patterns: Standardize templates, alerts, and dashboards across teams to speed onboarding and reduce variance.
Done right, SolarWinds becomes a single pane that’s actually useful, not just another console.
How to Display SolarWinds Skills on Your Resume
3. Nagios
Nagios is an open-source monitoring platform that tracks hosts, services, and infrastructure, alerting you before small issues snowball.
Why It's Important
It offers flexible checks, robust alerting, and broad extensibility, which means you can model exactly what matters in your environment.
How to Improve Nagios Skills
Clean configuration: Organize hosts, hostgroups, and services. Use templates and inheritance to scale cleanly.
Use richer plugins: Add or write plugins to cover protocols, APIs, and custom health checks specific to your stack.
Automate remediation: Wire common failures to runbooks or job runners (for example, Rundeck) to reduce toil.
Better visuals: Pipe metrics into dashboards (Grafana, Kibana) for trend insight beyond alert pages.
Alert smart: Integrate with incident platforms (PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Slack) and set quiet hours, deduplication, and on-call routing.
Iterate often: Review noisy alerts, prune stale checks, and keep documentation tight.
With disciplined configs and smart alert paths, Nagios becomes steady and predictable—exactly what a NOC needs.
How to Display Nagios Skills on Your Resume
4. Splunk
Splunk ingests, searches, and analyzes machine data at speed, turning logs and metrics into answers. NOC Analysts lean on it for troubleshooting, security insights, and operational intelligence.
Why It's Important
It enables real-time detection and historical analysis, so you can trace incidents across layers, correlate signals, and confirm fixes.
How to Improve Splunk Skills
Streamline ingestion: Normalize fields, tag sources, and drop noise at the edge. Clean data makes everything easier.
Write efficient searches: Use tstats, lookups, macros, and scheduled saved searches to cut latency and resource burn.
Dashboards with purpose: Build views for NOC workflows—health at a glance, drilldowns for impact, links to runbooks.
Proactive alerts: Trigger on meaningful thresholds and anomaly patterns; route to the right team with context.
Machine learning: Apply the Machine Learning Toolkit for baselines, outliers, and predictive signals where it truly helps.
Keep learning: Train the team, standardize SPL patterns, and share a library of searches and panels.
Good Splunk hygiene shortens outages and makes investigations less of a slog.
How to Display Splunk Skills on Your Resume
5. Cisco IOS
Cisco IOS (and IOS XE) is the software running Cisco routers and switches, delivering routing, switching, security, and management functions across the network.
Why It's Important
It’s the control plane heartbeat for vast enterprise networks. For an NOC, understanding IOS behavior is table stakes for stability and security.
How to Improve Cisco IOS Skills
Stay current: Plan regular software assessments and upgrades to close vulnerabilities and gain critical fixes.
Centralize configuration: Use Cisco Catalyst Center (formerly DNA Center) for standardized templates, drift detection, and safe rollbacks.
Assurance and telemetry: Leverage streaming telemetry and assurance features for real-time insight into device and path health.
Harden devices: Enforce AAA, secure management planes, lock down SNMP, validate routing neighbors, and use ACLs thoughtfully.
Prioritize traffic: Apply QoS to protect voice, video, and critical apps. Measure, then refine.
Automate: Use APIs, Ansible, and Python to push configs, check compliance, and gather state without manual drudgery.
Backups and DR: Keep config backups off-box, test restore steps, and document failover paths.
Skill growth: Pursue Cisco certifications aligned to routing and switching to deepen real-world competence.
Strong IOS practices translate directly into fewer pages and calmer nights.
How to Display Cisco IOS Skills on Your Resume
6. Juniper Junos
Juniper Junos is the network OS that powers Juniper routers, switches, and security platforms—clean CLI, consistent architecture, and strong automation hooks.
Why It's Important
For NOC teams supporting Juniper estates, Junos knowledge means faster troubleshooting, safer changes, and stable operations.
How to Improve Juniper Junos Skills
Master the CLI: Commit/confirm, candidate configs, and rollback are your safety nets. Use them habitually.
Hands-on labs: Practice with virtual labs and vendor-provided sandboxes to test configs and failure scenarios.
Stay updated: Track release notes and recommended versions; adopt features with clear operational value.
Automate with PyEZ: Script config changes, audits, and state checks. Start with read-only jobs, then graduate to changes with guardrails.
Structured learning: Work through Juniper’s certification paths to cement routing, switching, and security skills.
Community wisdom: Learn from real incidents, proven templates, and troubleshooting threads.
Junos rewards methodical habits—plan, stage, commit, verify.
How to Display Juniper Junos Skills on Your Resume
7. BGP (Border Gateway Protocol)
BGP is the Internet’s routing glue, exchanging reachability between autonomous systems and steering traffic across complex pathways.
Why It's Important
For NOC teams, BGP stability and hygiene prevent blackholes, route leaks, and jittery paths that upset users and SLAs.
How to Improve BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) Skills
Secure the edge: Use RPKI origin validation, strict prefix/AS-path filtering, and max-prefix limits. Trust, but verify.
Design for scale: Route reflectors, communities, and clear policy layering keep growth sane.
Monitor continuously: Track session flaps, path changes, and reachability anomalies with route analytics and alerting.
Automate configs: Push standard policies with configuration management to avoid fat-finger chaos.
Peer wisely: Use peering exchanges and well-documented policies; prefer predictable paths with sensible local-pref and MED use.
Practice break/fix: Lab common faults—AS loops, dampening mistakes, route leaks—and drill rollback steps.
Good BGP is boring BGP. Aim for boring.
How to Display BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) Skills on Your Resume
8. MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching)
MPLS moves packets using labels instead of long lookups, speeding traffic and enabling VPNs, TE, and resilient WAN architectures.
Why It's Important
It brings predictable paths, lower latency, and service separation—vital for large networks and mission-critical apps.
How to Improve MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching) Skills
Measure relentlessly: Monitor LSP health, latency, loss, and jitter. Use SNMP, NetFlow/IPFIX, and synthetic probes to see the real story.
Tight IGP and BGP: Keep OSPF/IS-IS stable and clean. Align label distribution with clear, consistent policies.
QoS that works: Classify at the edge, honor markings, and verify queues under load. Map classes to business importance.
Capacity planning: Audit links, track growth, and upgrade before congestion becomes chronic.
Security posture: Use segmentation, encrypt sensitive traffic, and lock down control planes.
Traffic engineering: Apply MPLS TE or segment routing to steer around hot spots and protect key flows.
When MPLS is tuned, apps feel snappier and incidents shrink.
How to Display MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching) Skills on Your Resume
9. SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol)
SNMP is the workhorse protocol for polling device metrics and receiving traps, giving NOC teams broad visibility across fleets.
Why It's Important
With it, you track performance, catch faults early, and maintain a consistent telemetry baseline across vendors.
How to Improve SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) Skills
Move to SNMPv3: Use authentication and encryption. Cut off legacy community strings wherever possible.
Standardize polling: Align intervals, MIBs, and OIDs across devices. Document what matters and why.
Segment access: Limit who and what can query SNMP. Separate management networks reduce blast radius.
Audit regularly: Review traps, ACLs, and credentials. Remove stale targets and unused users.
Alert with context: Translate traps into actionable incidents with device role, impact, and suggested next steps.
Train the team: Teach common OIDs, walk techniques, and how to debug timeouts, drops, and agent quirks.
Secure, consistent SNMP turns raw counters into reliable decisions.
How to Display SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) Skills on Your Resume
10. PowerShell
PowerShell is a task automation and configuration framework from Microsoft—now cross-platform—that speeds repetitive work and enforces consistency.
Why It's Important
For an NOC Analyst, it means faster fixes, safer changes, and reliable data collection across servers, services, and network stacks.
How to Improve PowerShell Skills
Core first: Learn cmdlets, the pipeline, objects, and formatting. Get comfortable reading and manipulating structured output.
Script like a pro: Build functions, modules, and parameterized scripts. Add logging and comments your teammates will thank you for.
Robust error handling: Use try/catch/finally and meaningful exit codes. Fail loudly when it helps, quietly when it should.
Leverage modules: Adopt community and vendor modules for AD, Azure, VMware, network gear, and ticketing systems.
APIs and DSC: Call REST APIs, manage configuration with Desired State Configuration, and standardize environments.
Version control: Keep scripts in Git, enforce reviews, and CI-test critical automation.
Keep current: Use modern PowerShell (7+) for better performance and cross-platform reach.
Small scripts add up to huge time savings when incidents hit.
How to Display PowerShell Skills on Your Resume
11. Linux
Linux powers a massive share of servers and network appliances. It’s flexible, scriptable, and battle-tested—perfect for operations work.
Why It's Important
Stable services, predictable performance, and transparent logs make Linux a natural home for NOC tooling and critical workloads.
How to Improve Linux Skills
Performance visibility: Use top/htop, iostat, vmstat, ss, and perf tools. Build a habit of measuring before changing.
Security basics: Patch regularly, minimize packages, enforce least privilege, and harden SSH. Consider CIS-aligned baselines.
Logging that helps: Centralize with rsyslog or journald forwarding. Standardize fields and retention so incidents can be reconstructed.
Network insight: Use tcpdump, iperf, ethtool, and nftables/firewalld to diagnose and defend.
Automate: Shell scripts for quick wins; Ansible or similar for fleet-wide changes. Schedule with systemd timers or cron.
Recovery playbooks: Backups, snapshots, and clear runbooks for kernel panics, disk failures, and service restarts.
Competence on Linux shrinks mean time to resolution and keeps surprises rare.
How to Display Linux Skills on Your Resume
12. VMware
VMware provides virtualization and cloud software that lets teams consolidate workloads, protect uptime, and manage infrastructure with agility.
Why It's Important
Virtualization is where many services live. Healthy VMware means efficient capacity use, reliable recovery, and strong availability across the board.
How to Improve VMware Skills
Watch performance: Use vCenter to monitor CPU ready, memory ballooning, storage latency, and network saturation. Trend it, then act.
Right-size resources: Align vCPU, memory reservations, and shares with actual demand. Balance clusters to avoid noisy neighbors.
Patch and upgrade: Keep ESXi, vCenter, and tools current for stability, security, and new capabilities.
Network sanity: Configure distributed switches, NIC teaming, and VLANs consistently. Validate end-to-end paths.
Storage health: Optimize datastore layout and policy. Consider vSAN or tuned storage arrays for predictable latency.
Guest optimization: Install VMware Tools, disable unnecessary services, and align OS settings to workload needs.
Automate with PowerCLI: Script deployments, audits, and remediation to reduce human error and speed routine work.
Disaster recovery: Test failover with Site Recovery Manager or similar. Document RPO/RTO and rehearse.
Security hardening: Apply host and vCenter hardening guides, role-based access, and secure logging.
Keep learning: Track feature changes and revisit designs as workloads evolve.
A well-tuned virtualization layer pays dividends every single day.
How to Display VMware Skills on Your Resume
