Home > Workload Solutions > Data Analytics > White Papers > White Paper—Cloud Native Splunk Enterprise with SmartStore—Predictive Maintenance for IT Operations > Predictive maintenance in IT operations
While predictive maintenance is traditionally associated with industrial machinery, it applies equally well to computing machinery (data center servers and storage elements).
All Dell PowerEdge servers are equipped with the integrated Dell Remote Access Controller (iDRAC), which delivers advanced, agent-free local and remote server administration. Embedded in every PowerEdge server, iDRAC provides a secure means to automate a multitude of common management tasks.
Beginning with iDRAC9, IT managers can integrate advanced server hardware operation telemetry into their analytics solutions with telemetry streaming. Telemetry can be provided as granular, timeseries data that is streamed or pushed, or can use legacy polling or pull methods.
The advanced agent-free architecture in iDRAC9 provides over 180 data metrics that are related to server and peripherals operations. Metrics are precisely timestamped and internally buffered to allow highly efficient data stream collection and processing with minimal network loading. This comprehensive telemetry can be fed into analytics tools to predict failure events, optimize server operation, and enhance cyber resiliency.
Telemetry performance reports include sensor data that indicates CPU usage, power consumption, and aggregate temperature readings, which can be used to predict overloading, overheating, and hard drive crashes.
In order to use iDRAC telemetry data for predictive analytics, these iDRAC metrics are used as the model inputs, and the model outputs are:
The associated design guide shows how it can be done and the use cases that Dell Technologies validated. While this solution is focused on Dell PowerEdge servers with iDRAC management and telemetry, the same methodology can be extended to other IT assets including networking and storage elements.