It’s the servers, stupid

Data centres are designed for one purpose: to house, in a safe environment, servers of various kinds.

Whilst monitoring your ambient data centre environment will cover you against air conditioner failure events, localised problems may not be detected.

A number of solutions are available to help minimise the chances of you missing hotspots in your data centre.

You can locate a number of temperature probes around your data centre, paying particular attention to the cold air inlets to your cabinets. If the air going into your cabinet is warm it will only become warmer the further up the cabinet it travels. Equipment higher up the cabinet may well be drawing much hotter air than the ambient temperature of the data centre as a whole.

An alternative is to monitor the CPU temperature of your data centre equipment. Most modern servers, switches and routers have sophisticated instrumentation built in.

Not only can you monitor CPU temperature, fan speed is often available too.

The bad news is that information isn’t always easy to access. Typically, you need to integrate the information into your network monitoring tool.

The information can be accessed using either SNMP and, on Microsoft Windows, via WMI. See your equipment vendor for further information.