The traditional view of the data centre falls into two categories: facilities and infrastructure. Facilities speak to the underlying systems that keep the data centre on its rails - the power, cooling, fire prevention and other operational logistics. Infrastructure points towards the assets within the data centre, such as the servers and network.
Monitoring software has simply followed this paradigm. Even though there are many choice applications through which to monitor individual areas within the data centre ecosystem, none offer a holistic view of the entire operation. Yet nobody is smarter for knowing less. When a company's performance relies on the well-being of its data centres - be they owned or leased, on-premises or part of a multi-vendor site - it can't rely on a limited view, nor should it have to with modern vendor-neutral monitoring systems.
Get to know your data centre assets
"Data centre assets shouldn't be kept at arm's length," said Kevin Kolobe, Solutions Architect: StruxureWare for Data Centers at Schneider Electric. "These are often the foundations of the services that power the business. They host and sort the company data. They are the source of the services that customers interact with. That could be an app or customer service software used at a help desk. I'm not surprising anyone by saying servers are important to a business. But they're much more important than most people think. These systems should be part of the strategic conversation, but that is impossible when you don't monitor all the parts and get the right information to the right people.
"Server ecosystems are complex, elaborate and range in age. Many large companies literally sit with hundreds of different systems, forgotten in a haze of operational activity. Traditional data centre monitoring software simply does not service this landscape properly."
Is your software able to audit for legacy, to spot under- or over-utilisation, or catalogue appliances down to their functions and delivery? Can your current monitoring software report on everything from CPU utilisation to room cooling? Can your software provide insight on capacity, from storage to the load-bearing of the floors? And, can it do this through a single pane or in ways to service specific business decision-makers?
Chances are it can't, because few have thought about building such an all-encompassing scope. This is because, in the past, such a platform would be impractical and expensive. But by harnessing modern development methodologies and building a platform with modular solutions, everyone in the data centre game can get what they need.
Making data centre assets matter to the business
That same data can be customised to a single pane of glass, as well as integrated into business applications to deliver insight to whomever needs it. Perhaps the CEO never wants to know about CPU cycles, but s/he could take a keen interest in how often key applications are being used. With modern monitoring platforms, this is possible.
Thanks to the modular approach, these holistic monitoring platforms serve both sides of the fence. A multi-tenant data centre is able to provide real-time insight and customised reporting to its customers.
It is true that best-of-breed infrastructure providers have their own monitoring software. But these are isolated and very specific. A modern monitoring platform should take advantage of this and unify their outputs. Instead of replacing such applications, they are complemented and included. A vast genome database enables our solution to automatically detect and identify new additions to the network through SMNP queries.
"We've seen customers use these systems to do regular asset audits. For example, one customers uses the software to check application utilisation of servers. They identify legacy applications that are used infrequently, using the data to motivate virtualisation and decommissioning the server. Because the software is modular, different companies append different services that make business sense for them."
A modern data centre monitoring platform is more than just a guardian over your assets. It is the opportunity to gain deep knowledge of the systems, to chart long-term behaviour, to plan more and to bring these vital systems closer to the business conversation. Whether you own or lease hardware, or if you provide the facilities for others to run their systems, modern monitoring with a holistic and customisable output is fast becoming a game-changing necessity in the business world.
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