Equinix Smart View FAQs
What is Smart View?
Equinix Smart View is a fully integrated DCIM software platform, with online tools that offer visibility into the real-time operations of your IBX.
Smart View gathers operational data from a variety of entities, such as building management systems (BMS) and power monitoring components. The gathered information (including power draw, environmental, mechanical, and electrical data) provides insight into the operating conditions relevant to your IBX colocation footprint.
What is DCIM?
A data center infrastructure management (DCIM) tool provides a view into data center utilization in support of infrastructure design and IT asset planning. It allows users to monitor and manage data center operations including energy consumption, infrastructure conditions, and the physical relationship between equipment.
What is the relation of DCIM with Equinix?
Smart View is uniquely set up to provide you only the data that is relevant to your specific Equinix footprint down to the cage, cabinet, and circuit levels. Smart View is pre-integrated, reducing the time and cost of DCIM implementation and deployment to zero.
Where is Smart View available?
To see where Smart View is currently available, see Smart View Availability.
What is the difference between facility sensors and RLE Wi-Fi sensors?
Facility sensors provide environmental information (temperature and humidity) for your IBX data center, while RLE Wi-Fi sensors can also be installed inside the cage and near the cabinet to gather more granular information on the environmental parameters. The Ops team is responsible for changing the sensor batteries on the ground for a degrading battery, or malfunction in communication.
Why is maintenance information important?
Maintenance is paramount to a healthy data center. Maintenance activity, maintenance history, scheduled maintenance, and maintenance scripts provide users with maintenance data to indicate that the assets are operating correctly.
How are maintenance scripts updated?
Maintenance scripts are updated by the teams at each IBX data center. Script changes can be updated prior to the maintenance work, and then become the new version.
What is scheduled maintenance?
Scheduled maintenance shows maintenance that is planned to be performed. Maintenance is usually scheduled 3-4 weeks prior to the actual maintenance activities.
How do I know which maintenance script applies to which maintenance event?
Maintenance scripts refer to specific maintenance events. The script name is included in the maintenance event email notification you received.
Do the maintenance scripts refer to a planned maintenance number?
A single maintenance script does not refer to a planned maintenance number, because the same script can be used for maintenance on multiple assets of the same model in an IBX data center.
Why do all of the assets have different names?
This is the result of the building management system (BMS) upgrade. Smart View sources some of the information from BMS assets to deliver power, humidity and temperature information. Upgrading BMS required deleting existing assets and re-adding them under different names.
What is the difference between system alerts and custom alerts?
| Alert Type | Defined By | Data Sections | Notifications | Monitoring by Equinix |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| System Alerts | Equinix(these alerts are standardized across all IBXs) | Mechanical, Electrical | Customers can subscribe to receive notifications when a system alert becomes active or inactive. Note: Smart View Environmental System Alerts are only available to customers with existing Customer owned Smart View Wifi environmental sensors that are already installed in their cage(s). This product has been decommissioned and is not available for new installations. | Active system alerts are monitored by our Global Operations Engineering team. |
| Custom Alerts | Customer | Environmental, Power Draw | Recipients receive notifications when the specified alert conditions are met. | Equinix is not notified when custom alerts are activated. |
Why aren't my custom alerts functioning?
Custom alerts are tied to specific assets. Upgrading our building management system (BMS) required deleting existing assets and re-adding them under different names, which rendered them non-operational.
It's also possible that this issue has been caused by a lost connection to associated assets or data processing failure. If your custom alert isn't associated with assets located in an IBX data center that has undergone a BMS upgrade, contact our IBX data center staff.
How do I change my preferred units of measure?
To change the units of measurement (such as degrees Celsius versus Fahrenheit) displayed in Smart View, see User Preferences.
Building Management System Upgrade
What is a building management system (BMS)?
A BMS is an interface which data center operators use to manage and control critical data center assets (electrical, mechanical, environmental). BMS gathers operational data from these assets and relays it to the Equinix DCIM platform, to be viewed in the Smart View portal or retrieved using the Smart View APIs.
What is the BMS upgrade project?
Equinix IBX Operations is upgrading the BMS in select data centers to a global standard.
Why is Equinix upgrading the BMS in their data centers?
Upgrading a data center’s BMS becomes necessary due to evolving global standards, end-of-life hardware, and to enhance management of critical assets.
Will the upgrade impact operations of the data center or availability of any services?
The upgrade will not impact operations of the data center or the availability of any services, with the exception of Smart View. There will be no impact to power, temperature, humidity control, etc.
How will this impact Smart View?
Equinix will recreate all data center assets and their organizational hierarchies in the new BMS. During the migration of assets from the legacy BMS to the new BMS, they will not be available in Smart View.
Will there be additional impact to the assets monitored by Smart View?
When the BMS upgrade is complete, Smart View will reflect the same assets as before the upgrade, but with a modified naming convention aligned to the new BMS. Any Smart View custom alerts or system alert notifications must be recreated.
Also, since the assets will appear as new assets in our data collection and processing engines, there will be no access to historical data through Smart View.
Can I get historical data about the old assets after the upgrade?
No. Historical data will not be available for the legacy assets after completion of the BMS upgrade. However, prior to the upgrade, you can pull a history of system alerts and resiliency status changes through the System Alerts and Resiliency report located under the Advanced Reports tab of the Smart View Reports page.
Can I get historical data about the new assets?
Yes, you can begin collecting historical data about the new assets once they are online with the new BMS.
To learn more about Maintenance, see Maintenance Activity, Maintenance History, Scheduled Maintenance, or Maintenance Scripts.