Data center personnel make a lot of effort to prevent service interruptions because downtime and unmet service level agreements (SLA) are very costly issues. There are two significant ways data centers can keep their services up and running: first, by using the most reliable hardware possible and, second, by providing redundancy in compute and storage.
Data center personnel make a lot of effort to prevent service interruptions because downtime and unmet service level agreements (SLA) are very costly issues. There are two significant ways data centers can keep their services up and running: first, by using the most reliable hardware possible and, second, by providing redundancy in compute and storage. But when all is said and done, how do you know if you are utilizing your data center as expected? How do you know if a component is a bottleneck, is too stressed, or has potentially already failed?
Answer. Data center monitoring. To be precise, this is what data center monitoring should include:
- Scalability. Every data center monitoring solution should be tailored with scalability in mind. Scalability requires having minimal performance overhead from the monitoring software itself, and providing an embedded scheme to get more compute power for monitoring as the data center expands.
- Monitoring, Alerts and Triaging. A data center monitoring tool should have a central dashboard that provides views of your data center for performance evaluation and notifications. This central dashboard should also let you triage and identify potential issues ranging from misconfiguration to components that are struggling or offline.
- Analytics and Predictions. A monitoring tool should provide a holistic view of a data center by collecting extensive metrics, and should come with analytics capabilities, such as pattern detection and trend analysis. A useful data center monitoring tool should be the central technical platform where future maintenance and provisioning needs are predicted and planned.
Although data center monitoring tools may include some reset and control features for certain hardware and software stacks, you should not expect such management capabilities to be complete. The most important objective is to help ensure that the data center monitoring integrates with your existing data center provisioning and management procedures.
