Editor’s Note: This blog is abbreviated version of the original written and published on May 25, 2018 by our DCIM partner, Sunbird® Software.
Data center monitoring is one of the most common use cases for Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) software. Whether in an enterprise facility or a colocation data center and regardless of whether you are keeping an eye on power, environment, or security, data center monitoring helps ensure that the business-critical systems and equipment in your data center stays up and running smoothly.
However, in addition to maintaining uptime, data center monitoring tools can also help data center managers in their never-ending quest to do more with less. Let’s look at how data center monitoring can help you increase your data center team’s productivity.
How Data Center Monitoring Can Increase Productivity
Consider the following three ways that information gleaned from data center monitoring tools and other data center software can help you improve your team’s efficiency:
1. Data center health status, alerts, and reporting. Data center power monitoring enables real-time reporting and alerts for everything from health statuses to threshold violations. A comprehensive DCIM solution will help you visualize the health of all your sites in one view with simple red-yellow-green color coding. Additionally, you should be able to manage and configure notifications so you are alerted only to the events in your data centers that matter most to you. As a result, you will know immediately if there is a problem in your data center and be able to rapidly respond to any changes.
2. Proactive capacity forecasting. Monitoring data collected in your data center software can be used to improve data center capacity planning. Space, power, cooling, and network connectivity data can be captured and analyzed to more accurately predict when you will run out and determine if you need to acquire additional resources. This data can also help you to identify ghost servers and other underutilized resources, as well as to optimize the thresholds you set for data center energy consumption, power management, and environmental monitoring.
3. Avoid hotspots. Data center environmental monitoring integrated with intelligent PDUs can help you make informed decisions to avoid overcooling and hotspots. Thanks to significant increases in density in recent years, data center environment and energy management are more important than ever. Decommissioning servers and billing back customers to drive energy-efficient behaviors are two well-known strategies for controlling costs. However, you can also analyze temperature, humidity, and other environmental data against ASHRAE® recommended ranges to calculate potential savings and chart trends over time. ASHRAE envelope allows you to operate in the most energy efficient mode and still achieve the reliability necessary as required by your business. Collecting and analyzing this data automatically with your DCIM software certainly beats manually going to each cabinet in your data center to read a display or thermometer!
Data center monitoring is one of the most critical elements of maintaining the health and efficiency of your data center. Learn more about how it can help you improve the productivity of your data center team. Read the full blog.
Brittany Mangan, Digital Content Specialist