Top 5 Data Center Monitoring Trends You’ll See in 2019

1.      Rise of the Machine - Machine Learning

With the massive growth of big data and machine learning adoption, 2019 you’ll begin to see data centers leverage the new technology.  Machine learning will provide a holistic view of all the available telemetry, power, temperature, and performance data, providing actionable intelligence.  This will enable organizations to predict, and thus avoid, potential outages while also finding ways to squeeze more savings from infrastructure operations.

2.     Focus on Workloads

In 2019 infrastructure teams will begin to focus more on workloads, rather than just the computing infrastructure itself.  As an example, data center power distribution is balanced to insure failover in the event of losing the primary or secondary power feeds. In the event of a catastrophic power chain failure and given the current IT workload, what is the current battery runtime for the UPS’s?  Understanding how workloads affect battery runtime, even under normal operating conditions, is a critical component for proactively planning disaster response and reactions to an event. Using the latest technologies teams can now map specific workloads to virtuals to infrastructure giving them unprecedented ability to predict and operate proactively.

3.     Facilities and IT Operations Form Tighter Processes

One of the largest trends in 2019 related to monitoring is not about innovation, but rather a more holistic, singular approach to managing data center environments.  The traditional wall that separated Facilities Operations and IT Operations is dissolving, and 2019 you will begin to see IT operations interacting more with facilities for improved capacity planning, charge back and performance.

4.     Increased Monitoring Transparency

In 2019 you can expect greater transparency that data center managers and operators have a of what they require and where their blind spots are.  There are many options to overlay monitoring without requiring a full blown infrastructure upgrade project (and costs associated), so those blind spots are covered more easily than in the past.  2019 we will see improved monitoring transparency across all devices and environments an organization has whether they own those data centers or they use colocation facilities.

5.     Integration and Automation

The other trends on this list are ultimately driving more integration and automation in how infrastructure teams manage and report to systems dependent on the data center, such as ITSM, security and ERP systems.  Where data center monitoring systems could exist as islands unto themselves, in 2019 you’ll see an even greater push to integrate these systems into the more broader IT governance and operations ecosystem. In this way, organization can manage from application down through the workloads and virtual into the data center and the facilities.   By doing so, they can get a better view of all processes and costs of maintaining their applications - while also hopefully improving their uptime.