We interview Blizzard's GNOC team in Cork, Ireland!

Welcome! Bienvenue! Willkommen! Добро пожаловать! Fáilte!
Cork is Ireland's second-largest city, after the capital, Dublin. The city has a population of around 120,000 and is located in Ireland's scenic Southwest, close to the popular tourist locations of Blarney, Kinsale, Baltimore, Killarney and Dingle, most of which are part of Ireland's world famous Wild Atlantic Way.

The city itself is well known for its food and fun. As a small, compact city, it's always full of life and excitement. There’s plenty to do and see here but don't miss the English Market, Patrick's Street, and Cork Gaol. You'll also find a great selection of restaurants, pubs, clubs, theaters and museums.
 

Blizzard has been in Cork since 2007. The office is home to our EU Customer Service and GNOC teams, and they provide critical support to not only our global player base, but internal teams throughout the organization. We sat down with our GNOC crew recently to learn a little bit more about what they do, how they do it, and why they do it here at Blizzard.

GNOC Roundtable

Pictured from Left to Right:

Front - Marcin Karpik -  OpsCenter Shift Manager in Blizzard – October 2017
Isaac Llamas - Administrator, Linux Systems – September 2015
Gunnar Voss - Associate Administrator, Linux Systems – November 2010

Back - Michela Tigli – Associate Administrator, Linux Systems – March 2016
Jon Torre –  Associate Administrator, Systems – July 2009
Patryk Wolowiec – Associate Network Administrator – August 2009
Vladislav Kollerov - Associate Administrator, Linux Systems – September 2010
Tiago Baptista - Senior Linux Systems Administrator – April 2018

What is GNOC and who does it support?

[Michela] The Global Network Operation Center (GNOC) is the Blizzard department that monitors the global infrastructure for all our internal services and Blizzard games world-wide.

[Marcin] We proactively monitor and engage Incident Management to resolve ongoing issues and our primary goal every time is to resolve any service degradation before players or end-users ever experience it. To ensure we always have eyes on our games we work according to the follow-the-sun model. To do this we have two separate GNOC offices; the team in our Irvine, CA headquarters covers 16 hours a day and we cover the rest, during their nighttime. Each team has global responsibility. As far as support goes, whenever you play our games, browse Blizzard web sites, attend one of our events, or even take in an Overwatch League match then you’re our customer, and GNOC has your back.

[Jon] We’re the first line of response whenever things go wonky in our infrastructure. Something weird in your neighborhood, who you gonna call? HINT: The GNOC. Although now I wish we had proton packs...

[Patryk] If you’re a Game of Thrones fan, just think of us as the Night’s Watch for Blizzard, except ‘The Wall’ that we’re guarding is our IT infrastructure. We take a tremendous amount of pride in protecting our realms and players. GNOC really does support the entire organization, so our customers are not only our players and communities but also every team within Blizzard. We make sure our players can play and our teams around the world are not impeded by any obstacles and have everything they need to do their jobs.

[Gunnar] We’re very fortunate to share the office with Blizzard’s world-class customer service (CS) team. This gives us an incredible advantage in terms of identifying potential issues as they happen and gaining insight into what our players are experiencing. GNOC is the nerve center for IT and acts as a kind of CS for everyone so the collaboration is crucial. Several members of our team originally started in CS and it’s been awesome to see how they apply their passion for helping players in a whole new way.

[Marcin] Having CS as on-site neighbors is a big advantage. They really are the best at what they do and the possibility to meet in person and exchange thoughts or set up shadowing sessions is priceless. It helps us better understand the impact of certain issues on our customers by seeing things from their front-line perspective.

What happens when a potential issue surfaces?

[Marcin] Every incident starts with validation; we assess potential impact and if we can resolve it alone or need to loop in another team for help. Our escalation process is automated, so our system quickly brings all the stakeholders together online to help triage. This is key as every minute can make a huge difference.

[Michela] Automated tools help us monitor quickly, but it takes real eyes and ears to do the job correctly. Our CS and SLC teams collect and analyze player feedback to identify potential issues, which often leads to mitigating small fires before they grow. This helps us establish a real-time interaction with players while putting a strong effort to resolve the issues that can impact their game quality.

[Jon] In addition to fighting fires we also support every game launch and most of them have different degrees of complexity and issues. We assist on all of them, from the smallest patches to the biggest launches. It’s our job to take care of all issues too, from the smallest “annoyance” to the biggest outages. Launch days are an exciting challenge for us and part of why it’s a blast to do this job at Blizzard.

[Patryk] It’s inevitable that outages will happen, but our job doesn’t end when the problem is fixed. We always take the time to conduct full postmortem investigations to understand the cause of the incident and hopefully identify ways to better mitigate so we have less downtime/impact to our customers in the future. We’re continuously working on improving monitoring to detect problems faster and improve our ability to respond as quickly as possible.

[Patryk] It takes an appreciation that GNOC is not just about solving the problems, as it goes deeper than that. If you want to understand GNOC, you need a mindset focused on exploring. Fixing an issue is great, but it’s not the whole job. Exploring the root cause, working with our monitoring team to improve the alerting system to detect the issue faster, establishing more accurate thresholds and proactively finding a solution to permanently mitigate the impact – that is what GNOC is really about.

[Tiago] Attention to detail and a penchant for thinking logically and often outside the box to handle non-common issues are important. You also need the ability to communicate effectively considering that often we have to relay issues to other teams as they join in to help resolve.

[Jon] Be on alert during the peaceful times, be calm in the middle of the storm. Maintain constant two-way communication. Cover all bases and think outside of the box. Think several moves ahead to avoid small issues becoming huge incidents. And think players first, always players first.

[Gunnar] To me, a perfect candidate is fresh, happy and totally open-minded to learning and accepting feedback. We of course look for fundamental skills, like understanding Linux and Windows to support our infrastructures and analytic skills to peel away the layers of a given incident. However, the most important thing to thrive on a team like GNOC is curiosity. Our team is naturally investigative and pairing that with an eagerness and interest in learning is key. This will not only help with creative problem solving but it’ll also mean you’ll never have a boring job! Having total passion for what you do for a living is something I see consistently at Blizzard, no matter the location or team. Loving your profession cannot be overstated. We’re all craftsmen here in our own way, and Blizzard’s built an environment to draw out our best effort. You simply can’t fake this kind of excitement. That’s our culture, that’s our fit…be it and we’ll dig it!

How does Blizzard Cork live the core value ‘embrace your inner geek’?

[Tiago] The freedom we have to express ourselves is clearly visible throughout the office, and the abundance of Blizzard IP makes it a dream to walk through every day.

[Marcin] The easiest way to get the answer is to look at our desks. They are covered with all kind of things: statues, gadgets, pictures, music instruments. Your desk is your work space and you need to feel comfortable at it. We have terrific facilities here too: spend time in the Evolution Chamber where you can lose yourself in books, board games, or playing games on consoles. We also have the Proving Grounds, our Blizzard-themed gym onsite as well. Here on the GNOC team we celebrate birthdays, promotions, we meet after work from time to time. We play games together. During the year we have many events like BBQ’s, a raging holiday party, number of fun little contests and more.

[Gunnar] We’re a geeky company and we take pride in keeping it that way. In Cork we celebrate Blizzard and enrich our floors and rooms with everything we stand for, be it through our shared mission statements and core values or simply showing what you have passion for in your life whatever that may be. It oozes Blizzard everywhere around the office but that’s not all it is. Of course, if playing games is your passion, you’ll surely find like-minded folks here. Beyond that - are you a freaky Star Wars fan? Into needlepoint? Love anime to death? Into your local sports team, or collect vinyl records or obsess about theater? It’s all good! The point is to have passion for what you do and what you like in life.

[Michela] Cork embrace their inner geek by constantly feeding the curiosity of learning new things related to the IT world, culture (like tv series, comics, books, music and so on) and games of any kind (tabletop, pen and paper, larp, console, pc, card games). It’s an incredible atmosphere of working and playing together. It feels like home. 

[Patryk] It’s like a tradition now that every time we have an event in Cork GNOC we go out for pizza and beers. We’ve recently hired two fantastic admins so there’s plenty more celebrating to come!

What comes to mind when you think about ‘Blizzard culture’ overall?

[Marcin] People, our core values, the fact that we are tech company at heart. Altogether, it creates an amazing work atmosphere. When you attend events like BlizzCon, Gamescom, Overwatch League or similar, you feel proud to be part of an incredible company working together dedicated to providing the most epic entertainment we can make to millions of people around the world.

[Jon] We know we can count on each other and we respect each other. It’s a family feel. We go out of the way to help our colleagues. We have a positive spirit. We celebrate our peers' success and are not afraid to accept feedback.

[Patryk] You can approach a random person in any of our offices and find common interests to talk about at length. Looking for a raiding guild? Looking for someone to dive deeper into Diablo III's greater rifts? Or maybe you just want a casual game of Hearthstone? Or maybe it’s nothing to do with games at all. You can find all of this here and more.

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