Server hardware health status monitoring : Examining the reliability of a centralized monitoring architecture

Monitoring of servers over the network is important to detect anomalies in servers in adatacenter. Systems management software exist which can receive messages from servers on which such anomalies occur. Network monitoring software are often used to periodically poll servers for their hardware health status. A centralized approach to network monitoring ispresented in this thesis, in which a systems management software receives messages from servers, and is polled by a network monitoring software. This thesis examines the reliabilityof a centralized monitoring approach in terms of how accurate its response is, as well as the time it took to respond with the correct hardware health status when polled, when it is affected by varying degrees of traffic through conducting an experiment. The results of the experiment show that the monitoring architecture is accurate when exposed to a level of load which is in line with scalability guidelines as offered by the company developing the systems management software, and that the time it takes for a hardware health status to be poll-able for the majority of the measurements lie within the interval 0 to 15 seconds