One summer weekend, the air conditioning unit for our server room “died”. When we came in on Monday morning, the temperature in the server room was over 110 degrees! By sheer luck, we did not lose any of our hardware to thermal damage – a potential loss of over $50,000.
I immediately looked for a way to monitor the environmental conditions of our server room. It had to have a couple of requirements. First, it had to be inexpensive. Second, it had to have a way to notify me if there was a “problem”.
What I located was a product called the MicroGoose from a company called ITWatchDogs. The product page is http://www.itwatchdogs.com/product-detail-microgoose-9.html. The list price of the unit is $199.
The MicroGoose is a small unit that attaches to our network. It resides in our server room and monitors the temperature and humidity. It was simple to set up and allowed me to define my own “alarm” conditions. If the temperature or humidity numbers exceed safe levels that I define, the unit sends an email to me (which is then relayed to my BlackBerry).
