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Herman Chan , President , Sunbird Software
The top 12 KPIs you need to monitor to remotely manage your data centres are :
• Power utilisation and capacity per cabinet . Data centre power resources are increasingly constrained , while managing to uptime competes with driving efficient power utilisation . By monitoring your power utilisation and capacity at the cabinet level , you will improve uptime by ensuring you don ’ t exceed capacity and save money by discovering stranded power capacity .
• Real time power trends per cabinet . Many data centre managers take weekly or monthly measurements of their power consumption , leaving them vulnerable to short-term peaks and potential overloads that are not detected . Monitor your power consumption per rack in real time , trend that data continuously and set thresholds and alerts to ensure that you are notified and able to react before there is a major issue or users are impacted .
• Stranded power capacity per cabinet . Data centre managers will often plan , budget and allocate more power to each server than is actually demanded by the IT equipment . This causes stranded power that can still be utilised in racks . For a single rack , a couple of kilowatts of stranded power may seem unremarkable but when you factor in hundreds or thousands of racks , stranded power could account for as much as 50 % of all available power . Monitor power consumption in your data centre to identify stranded capacity . Then , deploy that power with confidence and delay spending millions to build your next data centre .
• Available rack units trend . This KPI allows you to see when you may run out of space and how many items can be installed in your data centre over time , based on RU height . It is useful to identify trends in the efficiency of your use of space and to correlate how much space vs . power capacity you have to deploy new devices .
• Available floor space remaining . In addition to tracking available cabinet space , track available floor space by the number of open cabinet positions to know how much white space is available to deploy new cabinets on the data centre floor .
• Data and power ports capacity and usage trends . How effective you are at planning and managing your data centre capacity is related to how detailed you are managing your port level capacity . Tracking capacity down to the data and power port level provides granular data that clues you in to how many available ports remain . Monitor your usage and capacity by connector type to ensure you never run out of free data or power ports in your data centre . By tracking physical port capacity at the cabinet level , you can intelligently provision new equipment , make more informed capacity planning decisions , use power and network resources more efficiently and reduce operating expenses .
• Requests by requester , stage , type and location . To maintain SLAs while improving efficiency and productivity of data centre staff , you must properly monitor and manage moves , adds and changes . Track the status and number of change requests , tickets and work orders – who is making them and where – what progress is being made and what types of changes are being requested . Track your requests from creation to approval to ensure work order quality and transparency while improving staff efficiency through improved collaboration .
• Completed requests over time . It ’ s important to know how much work is being done in the data centre . One method of doing this is by monitoring the number of completed requests by type of request over time . Tracking data centre activity and productivity in this manner allows you to manage human resource
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IT ’ S MORE CRITICAL THAN EVER TO INTEGRATE , ANALYSE AND ACT ON THE KPIS THAT HAVE THE MOST IMPACT ON YOUR DAILY IT OPERATIONS .
capacity , utilisation and productivity more effectively and find opportunities for process enhancements .
• Asset audit trail . Having complete visibility and transparency into the information and history of any asset in your data centre helps drive efficiency and facilitate compliance . For the most effective remote data centre
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