Server room and data center monitors

[MerakiJockey505]

Our organization utilizes a few core data centers as well as several smaller server rooms and utility closet setups throughout the state.  We monitor things like temperature, disk status, and battery loads at all of these sites.  We are looking into adding some MV's into these rooms in order to monitor their physical conditions as well as the conditions of the racks and components we aren't able to reach through SNMP.  More specifically we would need to be able to identify the disk LED colors and the UPS and/or Battery Backup LED Screens to gather the temperature information.  Is anyone using them for this purpose currently or have any suggestions on best practices?

[MRCUR]

You're probably going to have a hard time getting that level of detail out of an MV, especially if mounted to a wall and not sitting directly in front of the device you're trying to see. We use MV's in our data centers, but not as device monitoring and instead just typical intrusion/environment monitoring. I (unfortunately) think you're going to have a hard time finding something enterprise oriented with the level of detail you're looking for since it's not a typical security camera deployment. 

[MerakiJockey505]

I was afraid of that.  I was hoping to be able to utilize something we could add seemlessly to our existing network but might as well just use them for what they are best at.  Thanks for the info!

[BHC_RESORTS]

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@MerakiJockey505 wrote:

Our organization utilizes a few core data centers as well as several smaller server rooms and utility closet setups throughout the state.  We monitor things like temperature, disk status, and battery loads at all of these sites.  We are looking into adding some MV's into these rooms in order to monitor their physical conditions as well as the conditions of the racks and components we aren't able to reach through SNMP.  More specifically we would need to be able to identify the disk LED colors and the UPS and/or Battery Backup LED Screens to gather the temperature information.  Is anyone using them for this purpose currently or have any suggestions on best practices?

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At 720p, I'm just not sure the resolution is there for that kind of clarity. Would depend on how close to the rack it was. For disk LED colors, you could probably get away with it, but I'm not sure the zoom could focus on the LED screen of a UPS. We have some 1080p cameras from a different vendor (we also have the MVs, this was legacy) and even at that resolution I'm not 100% it would work.

For physical security or environmental monitoring, it's a great use case. With motion retention, you should be able to get a lot of video storage.

I am somewhat curious now. I do have a few MV21s that I have yet to deploy while cable is being ran..perhaps I'll try it out and reply to this thread if I get any decent views on it.

[MerakiJockey505]

Thanks @BHC_RESORTS for the input, that is good information to consider.  I may give them a try as a test but looks like I'll have to play around with it if i'm going to use them for this purpose.  Thanks again!