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Data Center Monitoring
What is Data Center Monitoring?
Data center monitoring enables organizations to manage real-time data that is collected and analyzed, alerting staff of values that rise above or fall below established thresholds on all devices within a data center. Data center monitoring is at the core of a facility’s command center. Outside of the immediate benefits, data center monitoring can be incorporated into reporting that allows team members to make data center management decisions aided by relevant metrics.
What Items Can be Monitored in a Data Center?
Many items can be monitored in a data center, including equipment, environmental factors, and security measures.
The following can be monitored in the physical environment:
- Temperature: If the temperature in the data center gets too high, the equipment can overheat and fail to work properly or break.
- Humidity: Likewise, high humidity can cause equipment to malfunction and corrode.
- Airflow: The most common way to remove heat from equipment is through air cooling. Measuring airflow can determine whether the rate at which heat is being removed is sufficient.
- Air pressure: A slightly positive air pressure can prevent contaminants from coming into the data center.
- Cooling systems: If performance dips or there’s an error with the cooling system, this should trigger an alert.
Power can be monitored for:
- Current: When current draws are too high, power supplies can overload and fail to work.
- Voltage: Voltage fluctuations can cause damage, so voltage should be monitored to ensure it stays within a safe, narrow range.
- Frequency: Same as voltage, frequency fluctuations can damage equipment, so this range should also be monitored.
With equipment, data centers should keep an eye on performance metrics for servers, network equipment, and storage devices, each of which can experience degradation or errors in operation.
Physical and IT security should also be monitored. Intrusions can come in the form of people gaining unauthorized physical access to the facility, or through malware and digital intrusions, for example
What are the benefits of Data Center Monitoring?
Through data center monitoring, businesses can benefit from improved uptime, increased security, and can better comply with required regulations. Even though monitoring takes additional resources, it can also reduce costs by finding opportunities for efficiencies or stopping a problem before it becomes more expensive. Gaining a better understanding of a data center’s performance and health can also help organizations make more well-informed decisions about what to develop, change, or phase out.
How Does Data Center Monitoring Work?
The way data center monitoring works depends on what’s being observed. In general, a combination of automated tools and manual data entry is used to collect and analyze data. Data center operators and other team members can also create rules to set off alerts for pieces that need urgent attention.
Essential Data Center Monitoring Tools
Data center monitoring tools come with their own benefits and drawbacks, but some of the most popular monitoring tools include:
- Nagios
- SolarWinds Orion
- Zabbix
- ManageEngine OpManager
- Datadog
- New Relic
Data centers may also employ other environmental sensors and tools that check specific parts of networking, servers, storage, and applications.
How TierPoint Can Help with Data Center Monitoring
Setting up and running a data center is a job for several full-time employees. Often, this causes a strain on IT teams who already have too much to handle in a day. TierPoint can help by offering 24/7/365 data center monitoring with our onsite personnel.
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