Ongoing Maintenance & Monitoring

It is an obvious truism that given enough time everything will fail. The only tool we have at our disposal to hopefully delay this eventuality is maintenance service. Unfortunately, it’s another truism that for most small computer room operations, this vital step is not performed. As is unfortunately typical, we often put off short-term inconvenience for future unplanned and unpredictable grief.

Whatever the circumstance, there are plenty of tools to simplify the organization, planning, scheduling, and performance of field preventative maintenance. Real-time monitoring systems can serve as the front line of defense against unplanned outages.

PTS emphasizes utilizing IP and Web technologies to oversee and control critical support systems from just about anywhere. For power monitoring, we prefer to take advantage of the growing trend in the power strip manufacturing industry by having clients deploy power strips that can measure at the receptacle, therefore at the device level. For example, simple alarming of support infrastructure as critical load values approach predetermined thresholds will prevent against failures due to overload conditions and therefore curtail availability stripping outages.

In any case, monitoring systems for IT attributes and physical attributes should provide proactive management and enable the quick assessment of your present situation and notify the appropriate personnel should situations that threaten availability.

Is preventative maintenance high enough on your data center to-do list? What technologies do you rely on to monitor your critical systems?