As we enter a critical period in the effort to mitigate climate change, organizations are facing mounting regulatory pressure—along with a biological imperative—to reduce their carbon footprint. And for those that maintain significant on-prem infrastructure, energy costs associated with operating hardware components can significantly affect their bottom line. Hardware Sentry is a hardware monitoring solution that instruments your on-prem hosts and their internal devices—such as memory modules, network cards, and temperature sensors—to provide granular visibility into your infrastructure’s health and energy consumption. By reporting the energy usage of your hosts in terms of actual Watt-hours, dollar cost, and CO2 emissions, Hardware Sentry helps you clearly understand the financial and ecological footprint of your infrastructure.
We’re pleased to announce that the Hardware Sentry integration is now available in the Datadog Marketplace. In this post, we’ll discuss how you can use out-of-the-box dashboards and custom alerts to track sustainability metrics alongside the health, status, and resource utilization of your on-prem hosts—all from within a unified view in Datadog.
Monitor the health and performance of your hardware
Hardware Sentry generates dozens of metrics that detect health and performance issues in key components such as servers, network switches, and storage systems. Most vendors (such as Cisco, Huawei, HP, and IBM) and protocols (including SNMP, WMI, SSH, HTTP, and WBEM) are supported. Hardware Sentry’s Datadog integration automatically collects many of these metrics and ingests them into Datadog Infrastructure Monitoring, so you can track them using dashboards, alerts, events, anomaly detection, and more. The integration includes three out-of-the-box dashboards that each provide a different level of hardware visibility:
- The Main dashboard, which gives an overview of all monitored hosts, with a focus on sustainability
- The Site dashboard, which shows health and energy usage metrics scoped to one data center or server room and its associated hosts
- The Host dashboard, which shows metrics for a single host and its associated devices
The following image shows the Host dashboard, which collates health metrics scoped to a single host, including status indicators for monitored devices, CPU and disk utilization metrics, and network performance metrics. You can use these metrics to track when a host’s devices are failing and to spot critical issues with its memory resources.
The Host dashboard incorporates Datadog’s forecast monitors to help you predict issues and proactively address them before problems arise. For instance, by monitoring temperature forecast graphs, you can predict when the ambient operating temperature of a host will cross a critical threshold, which may lead to overheating and damage to your equipment. Or, you can use the disk endurance forecast to plan when to scale out or redistribute workloads that may be close to overutilizing a host’s physical storage.
Own your organization’s carbon footprint
In addition to providing key infrastructure health metrics, the Hardware Sentry integration also ingests a slate of sustainability metrics into Datadog Infrastructure Monitoring and the out-of-the-box dashboards. This visibility enables you to manage your sites’ energy usage, so you can reduce operating costs, avoid future carbon risk, and ensure compliance with increasingly tight emissions regulations. In the Site dashboard, for example, you can scope energy usage data to one of your organization’s data centers and view that site’s daily, monthly, and yearly energy consumption. Energy consumption metrics are expressed in terms of Watt-hours, dollar cost, and CO2 emissions, so you can clearly understand the financial and ecological impacts of your energy usage.
Optimizing your site’s ambient temperature helps your hosts run smoothly and efficiently, lowering your energy costs. The Site dashboard, shown above, tracks your site’s heating margin and current ambient temperature, and shows you how much you could save by adjusting your temperature to the recommended 24 degrees Celsius.
Stay alerted to issues with your hardware
The Hardware Sentry integration also ships with out-of-the-box alerts to notify your teams when key health signals—such as site heating margin, power consumption, and battery charge of a host’s devices—reach problematic thresholds. These alerts can be configured to trigger notifications via Slack and Pagerduty, or tracked using Datadog events. By monitoring your triggered Hardware Sentry alerts in the Datadog Events Explorer, you can track them alongside configuration changes and status updates from across your infrastructure. Datadog events enrich your alerts with key details such as device IDs and network credentials, and enables you to correlate alerts with related processes and infrastructure metrics, providing the context you need when declaring an incident.
Infrastructure health and sustainability monitoring in one place
By using Hardware Sentry’s offering in the Datadog Marketplace, you can easily track the health and energy footprint of all your on-premise infrastructure components from within a unified view—from aggregated metrics about a site’s hosts to status indicators on a single sensor. With robust out-of-the-box dashboards and alerts, the integration helps you maintain comprehensive infrastructure health and sustainability visibility, as well as gain insights into how to reduce your organization’s carbon footprint and operating costs. The integration is now generally available—new customers can get started using the integration with Datadog’s 14-day free trial. When you sign up for the integration, you’ll also have full access to Sentry’s support services to help solve any issue you may run into while deploying it.
The ability to promote branded monitoring tools in the Datadog Marketplace is one of the benefits of membership in the Datadog Partner Network. You can learn more about the Datadog Marketplace in our blog post, and you can contact us at marketplace@datadog.com if you’re interested in developing an integration or application.
If you’re brand new to Datadog, sign up for a 14-day free trial.
