Early Warning Systems: Data Center Monitoring

As a Solution Architect at Akibia, Patrick Bourke is responsible for assessing and designing data center solutions to meet the ever evolving requirements of today's enterprise organizations. Bourke has more than 13 years of experience designing and implementing cutting edge IT solutions.

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Organizations need continuous access to their network and computer infrastructures, and even a brief interruption to critical business processes can have devastating effects on revenue streams and customer confidence. By outsourcing data center monitoring to a third-party service provider, organizations can take preventative action before a problem occurs.

Why Monitor?

Today IT teams have more responsibilities than ever before, and are operating with fewer resources. Monitoring, although vital to the business, is only a small part of their daily jobs.

It is important that IT teams are aware of potential problems before customers notice them, and with effective monitoring, problems can be fixed before they escalate. For example, if an IT team was alerted that a drive was failing in a storage array, the failed drive could be swapped out before the failure occurred and the availability of the system would not be affected.

Organizations also implement monitoring solutions for capacity planning. The collection of data over time helps with trend analysis and forecasting when additional bandwidth or horsepower may be required. Getting ahead of the curve is far better than playing catch up.

SLAs and Monitoring

Additionally, some organizations need to meet SLAs for their customers, and monitoring parameters including network bandwidth, application response time, server up/down and user counts is critical to ensuring those SLAs can be met.

Considerations for Monitoring

Before implementing a monitoring solution, organizations should consider the following:

Once an organization has decided to outsource their data center monitoring, they should look for a vendor that is responsive to issues, possesses expert-level knowledge, is flexible in their configuration, secure from a network perspective, fault-tolerant and offers many monitoring options. Furthermore, they should take care of everything regarding the monitoring software licensing, maintenance, and patching.

Conclusion

There is obvious value in having an organization’s infrastructure monitored, including the ability to focus on the firm’s key revenue-generating activities and properly utilize their core competencies, proactively prevent outages if possible, increase critical network and system resource availability, stay in touch with the trends present in the complete environment to aid in capacity planning, and reduce the time for corrections and fixes.

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