Environmental Monitoring – CompTIA Security+ SY0-401: 2.7


An effective data center cooling system needs constant monitoring. In this video, you’ll learn some techniques for properly monitoring your computing environment.

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So we’ve got all these systems set up. We’ve created cold aisles and warm aisles. But is it really cooling? Is it really having the effect we want on the temperature? To know, we’re going to have to monitor this temperature over a period of time. We want to make sure that what we are cooling is working. We want to make sure that if we raise the temperature a bit to save money that we’re not doing this at the cost of the temperature of the systems in our environment. You may not need certain cooling systems. You may be able to turn off different cooling systems. But you’ll never know unless you actually monitor these things over time.

So we will want to get a thermometer that can track things over time, maybe provide us with humidity information over time. When night comes you, may have a different pattern than when it is daytime and very hot outside. You may find that different parts of the month are different depending on the number of systems and how much you’re working them. Higher CPU utilization will cause more heat in your environment. So we want to log this. We want to look at it. We want to look at those logs afterwards and evaluate, how’s our cooling system going? Do we have the proper amount of humidity? Is it working the way we would expect? We want to watch and make sure there are no spikes. We want to make sure there’s no outages.

If our system is one where our cooling system fails, you’re going to see your temperature rise, so you want your cooling monitoring system to also have alarming alerting capabilities to let you know, if you’re walking down the street one night, your phone has a message that pops up on it and says, we just lost a cooling system. The temperature is now risen to a certain amount. Then we can do something about it. We can resolve the issue. We can turn on additional cooling systems, or do whatever we need to do to make sure that we have business continuity, to make sure our systems continue to run.