Data Center Monitoring Best Practices

Efficient Data Center monitoring and management supports our digital economy. As a result, operation and protection of the Data Center are critical.

For reliable and safe monitoring, transparency is of utmost importance.

But it is surprising to witness that one of the least explored area in data center network establishment is monitoring.

This is ironic because at its core, a network has two goals: 1) Get packets from A to B 2) Make sure packets are received from A to B.

In this blog, we will be answering a few important questions around Data Center Monitoring, which are as follows:

• How important is data center monitoring for your organization?
• How to monitor and optimize data center in physical, virtual and cloud environments?
• What are Data Center Monitoring Best Practices?
• What are Motadata key solution highlights that help in measuring, monitoring, managing and controlling resources of a Data Center?

But before we delve deeper into each section, you must keep in mind that the big responsibility lies on data center managers who need to leverage the right tools if they want to successfully monitor mission critical IT devices.

How important is data center monitoring for your organization?

Data Center Monitoring gives the administrator the data necessary to understand the status of the organization’s infrastructure in real-time as well as the ability to measure progress towards operational objectives.

Through the continuous collection and review of data about the network devices, monitoring allows for measuring both current status as well as how well the network is progressing.

Data centers are at the heart of operation for any enterprise that operates an IT infrastructure.

They essentially host business applications and storage space for the entire business network.

Data centers might be anything from just a single rack with a couple of servers, to those spanning across cities or even countries essentially.

Real time datacenter monitoring becomes crucial when organizations want to ensure low downtime and improve overall performance of your data.

In order to ensure the best performance from your data center, it is crucial to implement data center performance monitoring based on three important parameters – network connectivity, server performance and storage performance.

The main setback admins face while executing this, is the lack of an integrated solution that provides visibility over all these three aspects.

To be precise outages or brownouts of critical applications can have a significant impact on the Data Center’s performance.

How to monitor and optimize data center in physical, virtual and cloud environments?

Monitoring the performance of a data center involves a synergy between application performance, physical and virtual server performance & sufficient bandwidth which becomes challenging at times without a unified solution.

Be proactive and avoid downtime: Monitor your data centers in real time tackling bottlenecks, fluctuations and bandwidth utilization. Understanding trends, patterns and behaviors helps you make informed decision.

Establish an open architecture: Enhances the performance in monitoring data center availability in a distributed environment spread across different locations.

Ensure 24/7 monitoring: Keep a tab on how your infrastructure is performing in real-time thereby preventing expensive outages.

What are Data Center Monitoring Best Practices?

The main takeaway here is that a well-thought-out monitoring plan, using network monitoring best practices, if implemented with modern open-source tooling can save an organization from major issues.

Here are some of those best practices:

1. Setting a monitoring strategy:

There are two fields to be considered when setting a strategy:

• Metrics
• Alerts

The right monitoring strategy requires the identification of metrics that are important for an organization.

Metrics are used for trend analysis and can be linked to alerts when crossing over a threshold.

Alerts can be triggered from multiple sources, including events, logs or metric thresholds.

Essentially metrics are collected and compared continually over time.

2. Acting on identified metrics:

The right approach is to start with no alerts and add the alerts that the team directly needs to be aware of.

So once the team has decided on the right metrics for the organization, the question becomes, what to do with the collected metric data.

Some metrics only makes sense in the long run, others have a more immediate impact on network performance and require immediate attention from team members. It is a continuous process to support the alerts needed by the team.

3. Establish the right alert mechanism in place:

If organization requires the ability to correlate different classes of data, then the type of tool or software being used determines the ability to implement a smart and comprehensive solution.

4. Prioritize:

An organization needs to determine ahead in time what are the most important notifications they require from their data center in descending order.

Incorrect prioritization can create blind-spots that could result into expensive downtimes.

5. All’s quiet is not always a good sign:

Systems fail. That’s inevitable. They choke on bandwidth or suffer an intrusion. Sometimes the monitor misses things.

Managers should not assume no alerts in weeks mean nothing’s wrong. The problem could be with the monitoring solution itself.

What are Motadata key solution highlights that help in measuring, monitoring, managing and controlling resources of a Data Center?

Motadata’s Data center monitoring solution helps you manage and monitor the IT infrastructure, the Data center environment and business critical applications from one customizable console or dashboard.

Key Solution Highlights that help measure, monitor, manage and control resources of Data Center and the energy consumption of both facility infrastructure components (e.g. Power distribution unit) and IT-infrastructure devices (e.g. Servers, Switches, etc.):

Advanced Reporting: Get complete transparency of the entire Data Center infrastructure facility which allows IT admins to make more informed decisions based on operational improvement levers.

Scale as you Need: The solution is future-ready and scalable. Data Centers’ are ever-growing, and so are the monitoring needs. Motadata can scale and grow with its open architecture.

Correlate Data: Failure to recognize the interplay or interdependency of the different elements can lead to unplanned outages, which can prevented using Motadata’s correlation engine.

Automate Processes: Drastically reduce complexity and human errors. Better utilize workforce with an automated solution for Data Center monitoring and management.

Smart Troubleshooting: Find & fix the root cause of the issue in one click before it impacts your end users. Trigger automated remedy actions to solve the problems.

If you want to gain complete visibility on the overall network performance of Data centers with more than 100 pre-defined reports, then sign up for the free trial today!