Day to Day duties of a Network Engineer?

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Hello,

Just a quick question. What are the main duties of a network engineer in a Cisco / Juniper environment (this excludes dealing server end W2K8 etc..)

From what I can just about gather is mainly monitoring and implementing updates the network, anyone currently in this type of roll? What is the day to day work like?

Regards,
Brad.

 

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I think it will largely depend on the environment. I work in a similar-ish role, but a lot of our stuff is supported by vendors, ie AT&T, DiData and so forth. So a lot of our hardware is under managed services.

As a consequence of this a lot of my work is exactly as you say, monitoring. Obviously physical patching is a requirement for users and new servers etc in the Data Centre. There are also some troubleshooting we will do on the internal Lan, although for the most part our LAN is very solid and usually when we do get issues it's because things such as firewalls or proxy servers crash, which are often managed or server issues, which for us are looked after by the server team in most cases.

I would assume you get a lot more involvement and meaty stuff working in a smaller company. Working in a bigger company you are probably pushed more towards Network Management and project led work. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it depends what you are looking for really.

 

Thanks for that,

I'm starting work in a NWE job Monday, no thanks the subnetting help you gave me when studying for the CCENT I still remember thoes links Coupe

I suppose as a Junior I'll be doing alot of learning as a pose to implementing fixes straight away, but the gist im getting is that its mainly monitoring or on a terminal screen checking the function of the Switches and Routers?

 

I'm glad the links helped, they helped me quite a lot when I was trying to get my head around it all.

I haven't actually done CCENT or CCNA myself, just read the books and blagged my way into the job internally. So I am very much working as a junior and as you say, mostly monitoring to start with. It depends how well you get on with your team though, get them to show you stuff, make lots of notes etc. I'm lucky really as I have worked for the same company for several years, and in my previous role a lot of it was monitoring systems, including SNMP monitoring for our network devices. So I already had a really good understanding of the landscape here before moving, and also really good working relationships with relevant parties.

Quite good here so far though, I have just been working on a project to install and configure a new Remote Access system, which I have almost finished now and got it working very nicely, if I do say so myself!

Next project I think is upgrading all of our Wireless AP's in two local sites as they are over subscribed, so need to be improved and also extra AP's added.

Then I am hoping to get involved in our IPv6 project, which is being headed by a colleague but i'm hoping to get in on it, get to grips with IPv6 now before it goes live etc.

One of the first things I got given though was client patching, so lots of switch work, assigning ports to correct vlans, including for voice, making sure they are not shutdown and ensuring the rest of the config is correct etc. So you will probably get to use a fair bit of your IOS skill quite early on for switches, maybe not routers though, most tend to be a bit more sensitive about those! lol.

That's my experience anyway, could be different for you, depends on your team and your manager and their approcah! Good luck though! I'm sure you will enjoy it!

 

Things that keep me busy during the day:

- Port configuration for access devices (VLAN changes, descriptions, locating devices)
- Datacenter patching, configuration (Nexus)
- Switch refreshes & capacity expansion
- 3COM to Cisco migrations
- DHCP/DNS (Infoblox)
- WLAN refreshes & troubleshooting
- RADIUS configuration for our BYOD network and security follow-up
- Monitoring (Cisco WCS, Syslog, Solarwinds and Cisco Prime soon)
- Implementing changes for Infrastructure projects (new subnets/vlans, device suggestions, ...)
- Cleaning up network racks.
- Ticket handling
- Travelling between sites

But I'm just a year in the networking field. Really have to get my head around Security, that should be the next level (after CCNP)