Infrastructure Monitoring Best Practices

When I ask people what infrastructure they monitor, I normally get a spread of devices including network and storage devices. However, I am less likely to hear about irregular bits of data center infrastructure such as system lights out controllers or smart PDUs that are often left unmonitored. These devices can provide useful insight into the state of your infrastructure including temperature and power consumption in many areas. 

With infrastructure monitoring being a critical aspect of increasing uptime for your business, here are some ways to monitor more and how Opsview can help.    

Oversee other things with infrastructure monitoring

Many of these devices will present out information via SNMP that can be collected by a monitoring system to give you accurate insight into statistics collected. For example, in our lab we collect power consumption in watts from many of our iDrac equipped Dell servers. This data can be used to further understand power consumption of equipment and available computer room capacity for later planning. As any data center guy will tell you, you always have more space than power! 

Start collecting with infrastructure monitoring tools

Collecting and managing different applications plays an important role in the infrastructure monitoring process. Some devices may not always be supported ‘out of the box’, but they are likely to be available in our Opspacks, which have community support and make it easy to create support for new SNMP checks inside of Opsview. Our Knowledge Center article fully breaks down the process and if this takes you more than five minutes per check, reach out to our support team. It should not be a challenge if you can make the device you’re adding in return results.

See value in IT infrastructure monitoring software

Let’s think, if we add in our PDUs or server’s power monitoring, what can we get back? Well we can start looking at power consumption trends and never have the need to visit the site to check the capacity and see if any hardware is acting up. If you’re monitoring your iDrac, you can agentlessly pick up the state of the RAID array without ever having to interact with the host OS or installing software.

Opsview Monitor showing live power consumption in watts

Infrastructure monitoring conclusion

Looking at the above check, we are now able to understand how much power capacity we have available in our rack at a glance and forecast any rack space growth that may be required in the future. 

While adding everything into you monitoring system may seem like a huge undertaking in development time and resources, if you look at what feeds of data are available to you and how they could fit into your platform, you will greatly enhance your infrastructure monitoring efforts. For more information, be sure to read our ‘Scalability: Ensuring Your Monitoring Keeps Up With Your Infrastructure’ whitepaper.