Data centers are the backbone of business infrastructure, hosting mission-critical applications, services, and data. Enterprise AI companies and other businesses require always-on connectivity – and data centers need to ensure 24/7 network availability and optimal performance.
Unfortunately, over half (55%) of data centers experienced an outage in the past three years.1 And with 66% of all data center outages costing businesses more than $100,000,2 downtime simply isn't an option. As a result, more data center providers are turning to data center monitoring tools to help solve issues that impact network performance and disrupt operations.
In this blog, we'll explain how data center monitoring assists providers in keeping their facilities operating at peak performance – so businesses can stay connected.
Data center monitoring is a process used by data center operators to continuously track, visualize, analyze, and manage infrastructure performance metrics in real time. With monitoring tools, data center staff gain end-to-end visibility and actionable insights with data from servers, network devices, power systems, and environment sensors across the entire data center. This data enables data center providers to optimize capacity, quickly react to unplanned downtime, and ensure their platform can meet customers' business requirements.
Data center monitoring tools use environmental sensors and specialized protocols to capture health statistics across all network infrastructure layers, from ambient cooling equipment and power systems to individual IT assets. Primary components include:
Data center monitoring software provides a central interface to aggregate historical data, apply analytics, and present actionable dashboards, mapping, reports, and alerts. Advanced systems can automate responses to security and performance issues using workflow engines and Representational State Transfer Application Programming Interfaces (REST APIs). Integration with popular DevOps tools is also commonly available to consolidate data center infrastructure visibility.
Environmental sensors throughout the facility feed into the data center monitoring system to track conditions like temperature, humidity, leak detection, door access control, and vibration. This allows staff to identify data center issues early, including hot spots, cooling failures, and unusual vibrations that could indicate imminent hardware failures. Sensors are available in flexible form factors to mount within racks, under raised floors, above drop ceilings, and on walls.
Software agents are installed on servers, network devices, and storage systems to communicate granular performance, utilization, and configuration data. Agents connect using protocols like Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), Redfish, and Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) to poll hardware health statistics while operating system agents provide insight into virtual machines, applications, logs, and software-defined infrastructure. Together, these agents provide comprehensive visibility of individual IT assets across thousands of devices.
Data center monitoring tools correlate all data sources into unified dashboards that combine environmental facility health, power system capacity, network topology visualization, and IT infrastructure status. This enables operators to quickly assess the overall health of their data centers and drill down to find the root causes of issues across equipment domains.
While data center monitoring solutions are highly customizable to each environment, most organizations focus attention on the following key areas:
Tracking key performance indicators for network infrastructure is critical for ensuring high availability and optimized application delivery across the data center ecosystem.
Server health metrics help administrators optimize virtual machine density and right-size instances, establish performance baselines, and ensure the data center infrastructure adheres to service level agreements (SLAs).
Holistic power chain monitoring combined with granular tracking of racks, servers, and infrastructure systems minimizes equipment failure while maximizing power utilization across critical components.
Comprehensive data center monitoring tools deliver several advantages to help data center staff ensure their customers stay connected, including:
By correlating real-time data and metrics across siloed monitoring tools, data center employees gain a unified view of all components within the ecosystem. With this end-to-end visibility, staff can identify and resolve issues faster and make strategic decisions for capacity planning.
A data center monitoring tool enables administrators to customize thresholds and alerts for temperature, humidity, and power utilization. Data center staff are notified about impending issues as early as possible. This kind of maintenance is critical for providing effective solutions to disruptive downtime events.
With detailed tracking and reporting of CPU (central processing unit), memory, and storage utilization, data center providers can identify overprovisioned resources to reduce operating costs or capacity gaps to prevent future shortfalls. With this intelligence, management can better align infrastructure investments with network demands.
Data center monitoring is also pivotal in tracking facility access and user activity for physical security and compliance auditing purposes. Detailed system logs enable forensics analysis while proving due diligence to regulators.
Given the central role modern data centers play in daily operations, any business that relies on colocation facilities or manages internal server rooms should implement data center monitoring. However, the following roles tend to benefit most from the holistic visibility and analytics a data center monitoring tool provides:
The day-to-day administration and upkeep of data centers depend on monitoring environmental conditions, tracking power utilization, and securing physical systems – all of which data center monitoring tools can streamline. Generating automated utilization reports can also aid data center operators in strategic planning for future growth and infrastructure lifecycle management.
Though not directly responsible for operating data centers, application developers rely on monitoring alerts to detect platform issues threatening SLAs. Server and network monitoring can help developers continuously tune environments to meet optimum performance levels as usage fluctuates.
Reporting on utilization rates, uptime metrics, and redundancy planning helps network teams allocate appropriate capital investments in power and cooling infrastructure required to maintain uptime as demand increases. Data center monitoring also validates the capacity needed for disaster recovery and availability across distributed facilities.
Demonstrating due diligence around environmental safeguards, access controls, redundancy planning, and change management procedures depends on monitoring and reporting tools tracking all facets of data center operations – especially when periodic audits dictate security and uptime certifications.
Enterprise AI companies and other businesses can't afford disruptions to their data center environment that jeopardize operations. Data center monitoring solutions deliver the actionable insights providers need to keep their business clients' mission-critical applications available and customers connected.
With over 15 carrier-neutral facilities across Canada's major metro markets, eStruxture offers businesses reliable, scalable data center and colocation services. We leverage comprehensive data center monitoring to track and analyze infrastructure metrics in real time, so you can trust us to support even the most sophisticated workloads. Our customized approach means you'll always get the most efficient combination of space, power, cooling, and connectivity your business needs to grow. Get in touch today to learn more.
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