Data center components
Typical data center infrastructure includes IT-related equipment and infrastructure components required to run the data center. While the IT-related equipment comprises servers, network devices, network connectivity, racks, cables, and chassis controllers, the operations hardware components might include power distribution units, cooling systems, and other hardware.
Challenges with DCIM
Since overall business operations, continuity, data storage, and cloud computing depend on data centers, there could be no compromise in data center operations. However, data centers bring certain challenges :
- Network uptime and maintaining optimal bandwidth
- Loopholes in firewall and load balancer performance
- Security, both network and physical
- WAN management
- Maintaining server uptime
- Storage monitoring and optimization
- DNS management
- SSL certificate management
- ISP connectivity and SLAs
- Physical environmental conditions and energy efficiency
- Adhering to regional data center standards
- Capacity planning, resource optimization, and cost-cutting
Site24x7 for DCIM
Site24x7 is a SaaS-based DCIM tool that monitors physical, virtual, and logical data center components. Key aspects of Site24x7's DCIM solution include:
Monitoring network connectivity
Network connectivity remains the backbone of data center operations. Site24x7's network monitoring solution provides continuous uptime and performance monitoring for all your network devices, including routers, switches, firewalls, load balancers, and WAN accelerators. By monitoring metrics like traffic, packet loss, errors, and discards, and projecting top devices as well as interfaces using a health dashboard, you can detect and eliminate performance bottlenecks with ease.
You can also track the WAN links, destination devices, and round-trip time for Cisco internet protocol service level agreement (IPSLA)-based devices. Track the traffic and bandwidth across devices, identify bandwidth hogs, and fix them to maintain continuous data flow.
Maintaining healthy servers
Data center infrastructure comprises different servers, including application servers, web servers, database servers, file servers, mail servers, virtualization servers, storage servers, backup servers, proxy servers, and DNS servers. Monitor the CPU, memory, disk utilization, and other crucial server performance metrics to ensure continuous data center operations. You can also monitor the chassis controller, racks, and cables using a simple plugin integration.
Ensuring a secure data center environment
Data centers handle sensitive data and preserving the sanctity of stored crucial assets is essential for business continuity. Network configuration management (NCM) helps network admins thwart human errors, security issues, and streamline configuration. Our NCM detects unauthorized and inaccurate changes and helps admins restore the running configuration. You can also monitor physical security devices, including security cameras, and safeguard the data center facility.
Optimizing resource utilization of storage devices and capacity planning
Storage devices like hard disk drives (HDDs), solid state drives (SSDs), network attached storage (NAS), tape libraries, and redundant array of independent disks (RAIDs) are the major components of a data center as they house all the data. You can monitor both the primary and the backup storage devices, and work out the capacity plan using the monitored data. With out-of-the-box capacity planning for server monitors, optimize resource utilization, plan your resources ahead, and save costs.
Ensuring secure data transfer
DNS servers are required for data transfer to and from the data center, to ensure efficient communication. Check for unsuccessful DNS forward lookups that affect user experience. Similarly, SSL certificates provide encryption and authentication mechanisms for the data transmitted. Configure threshold limits, receive alerts before your SSL certificate expires, and ensure data center security.
ISPs and data centers work together, and data center admins must track if the ISPs comply with the SLAs regularly. Monitor ISP latency at every hop level throughout the network path, and obtain a clear picture of how your ISP transfers data.
Following optimal energy conservation strategies
Maintaining data center cooling systems is a costly business. Energy-efficient data centers are vital for reducing operational costs, supported by continuously monitoring temperature, fan speed, cooling systems, and other hardware. Writing simple scripts and creating customized plugin integrations ensures you can effectively monitor data center hardware.
Implementing Site24x7 for DCIM
Get started with managing data center infrastructure by simply installing the server monitoring agents and an On-Premise Poller in your data center environment. Site24x7 delivers safe and secure data center monitoring and complies with all regional data center operational standards.
Advanced techniques and insights for an efficient DCIM
Automatically discover your infrastructure endpoints so you don't miss any critical components affecting your data center performance. Once you add your resources for monitoring, you can display them on an infrastructure map to get a clear picture of the infrastructure dependencies and interrelationships between assets. Next, you can consolidate and analyze logs across different servers and network endpoints to correlate logs in one place and troubleshoot issues effectively.
You can also detect anomalies like rising temperature or reduced fan speed with AI-powered anomaly detection, or forecast the storage space of your RAID using Site24x7's AIOps. For all the KPIs you track across servers, networks, and hardware, create a custom dashboard and project them on your NOC room screen for immediate attention and action. You can also receive alerts through email, SMS, voice calls, third-party collaboration tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams, and ticketing tools like ServiceNow. Utilizing Site24x7, you can also configure automation to auto-heal common issues like a full disk, snapshot clean up, and temperature reduction.
Conclusion
With an AI-powered monitoring tool like Site24x7, you can enhance infrastructure performance observability in your data center environment and improve efficiency and reliability. Leveraging real-time insights, you can obtain visibility into not only health but also the location, performance, and interoperability between data center systems. In complex networks like data centers, all you need is data correlation to reduce the meantime to repair, and Site24x7 accomplishes that for you.