Our computing technologies rely on a specific environment for optimal operation. In this video, you’ll learn about environmental and power monitoring.
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Our computing devices are very sensitive to the environments in which they live. They have a particular temperature range and humidity range that’s optimal. And you want to be sure to avoid any water getting near our electronic devices. That’s why we’re probably going to have a number of different environmental monitoring tools in our data centers to make sure that everything is running exactly the way it should be.
Temperature is an important aspect of the environment. And we want to be sure that things, of course, are not getting too hot. And at the same time, we want to be sure that we’re not overcooling the environment and spending more money than we should. And by monitoring the temperature over time, we should be able to regulate that so that all the equipment stays at the right temperature, but we’re not having to over cool the environment either.
Our temperature and environmental monitors are usually not one of these older analog devices. They’re usually a newer digital device. And we’re connecting it up with ethernet. And we’re connecting back to central monitoring tools that can provide us with alarming and alerting.
We also generally see multiple sensor components, not just a single bar that’s going across a piece of paper. It usually has many different types of sensors connecting to many different parts of the organization. And all of that information is consolidated back to one central environmental device, which then reports back to us.
In our servers, we have power monitoring built right into the BIOS and the motherboard. So you may be able to retrieve a lot of power details directly from the operating system. Our routers and our switches will often have a custom Management Information Base or SNMP MIB their devices. And we can simply query them via SNMP to find out how they’re performing and what the voltages might be inside of those devices.
A centralized power distribution unit could also be used to centralize all of your power, and therefore, centralize all your power monitoring. So you would only need to query the PDU to find out how all of the powers performing and what devices may be pulling more power than others.
We often overlook powers being something to monitor, because we’re so accustomed to it always being there. But in a data center, it’s so easy to overwhelm a single circuit, so you want to be very careful about what you’re plugging in, what circuit you’re plugging into, and you always want to be monitoring your power environment.