The Importance of Monitoring in the Data Center
Data Centers are complex facilities, with significant amounts of equipment—including servers, cables, power supplies, and cooling systems. To successfully manage and operate a Data Center requires a keen understanding of what’s happening in the room, beyond the data storage and management services you’re providing. You need to know what is physically happening – a complete picture of the equipment, the power, and the environment – in order to ensure you are maintaining uptime and are meeting your business goals. Doing that successfully requires wireless or wired monitoring.
And this is even more important in today’s environment, with the increased need for online learning and remote working and Data Centers and IT teams stretched thin. Unless your Data Center is a small data closet or edge facility, your Data Center is too big to rely on manual monitoring and counting equipment by hand. For example, keeping track of:
- The number of servers you have, where they’re located, and their state of being, on or off, and where they are in their lifecycle.
- The temperature on a regular basis, in the room and in the individual server racks.
- Power use, to ensure it meets load demands.
- Inventory, to ensure you are in compliance with security and controls regulations.
You need a full picture of your Data Center setup and systems, and the only way to do that is with wired or wireless monitors, stationed at key points within your Data Center and on your equipment. The data these monitors generate give you a picture of how your Data Center operates. That provides you the opportunity to set a baseline, optimize operations, and recognize in real time if something goes wrong—like a server overheating or a flood in the room. This helps you ensure uptime and that you can meet your business goals and service level agreements.
In this unusual time, with increased reliance on the internet and the Data Centers that are the backbone of services and data, make sure you have a picture of what’s happening inside your Data Center. To analyze your actual systems, determine what is working, and identify areas for improvement, including monitoring, check out our Data Center Report Card.
