Environmental Monitoring Channel Feature

Environmental Monitoring: Have you Established a formal Chain of Command upon Alarm?

By Carrie Schmelkin
TMCnet Web Editor

So you recognize the importance of placing environmental monitoring units in your data center and we are proud of you for that – we are. But have you taken the next step and determined what you will do in the event that your critical infrastructure actually exceeds its set temperature threshold, the environmental monitoring unit sends an alert to members of your team and then you actually have to figure out who will address the problem?

After all, what if the IT manager is on vacation? What if your data center manager is in a place with no cell reception? Your environmental monitoring unit has done its job but have you done yours in coming up with a chain of command if the alarm goes off?

“One of the most common mistakes is failure to establish a formal chain of command upon alarm,” Mo Sheikh, marketing programs manager for ITWatchDogs, said in a recent article. “Often IT administrators will strategically deploy an environmental monitoring system for the facility without establishing a formal procedure or chain of command for when the alarm actually occurs, especially for after business hours.”

“It is essential to have a plan in place where more than one person can be reached while away from work, and who can respond on short notice,” he added. “IT managers need to lay out exactly who is to be notified upon which alarm, and who is responsible for taking the first steps to solve a problem.  Each alarm should be reviewed upon resolving the matter, to figure out how to keep a certain situation from happening again.”

Okay, that sounds well and good, you might say, but how common is it that an air conditioner will really break or a sprinkler will burst in the data center? Very, according to industry experts.

In fact, just last Memorial Day, ITWatchDogs had all its trusty security dogs out to save the weekend, the company’s infrastructure and the infrastructure of other companies sharing the same office building. Over Memorial Day weekend, ITWatchDogs personnel received an alert at night notifying them that the server room temperature climbed from 75 degrees to 85 degrees to over 100 degrees. ITWatchDogs was not the only company affected by the temperature hike, as its office is in the same building that houses other high-tech companies in addition to an attorney’s office and a major financial service company.

“If we hadn’t notified the building on Monday the temperature would have continued to rise and by the time we got here Tuesday who knows what would have happened,” ITWatchDogs Sales Manager Pepe Ramos told TMCnet at the time. “All of our equipment would have been damaged along with everybody else’s equipment in the building. We are the only ones who notified.”

In addition to having a plan in place as ITWatchDogs did, it is also important to contract with third party providers. Specifically, if the A/C were to fail over the weekend, you would need your contracted technician to be alerted, in addition to the internal personnel, to quickly resolve a situation preventing any downtime.  

“It is helpful to implement a solution that provides escalating alarms per sensor, which allows users to set multiple alarms on a single sensor,” Sheikh said. “So for example, you can set an email, text and/or SNMP alert notification at 70 degrees for internal personnel, but if the same sensor were to go up to 80 degrees, you can have the system send another alarm to an additional layer of internal personnel plus a third party contractor to the alert notification for a prompt response.”“Furthermore, it is important to plan ahead for events that may occur and the processes and procedures that will resolve them,” he added.

For more on ITWatchDogs’ environmental monitoring products, click here.