Get Better Visibility into Your Data Center Operations

Knowledge is power. At Equinix, we empower our customers to make data-driven decisions based on what is happening with their equipment inside our International Business Exchange™ (IBX®) data centers. IBX SmartView™ is a standalone, single-pane-of-glass, fully integrated Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) software platform that provides near real-time environmental and operating information about our customers’ colocation footprint at Equinix IBX locations. Customers can access it via an independent portal application, through the Equinix Customer Portal, or through IBX SmartView streaming APIs.

Source: Equinix

IBX SmartView provides data that is specific to a deployment at the local zone, cage and cabinet levels, with alerts that allow our customers to react to important events and configurable reports that enable proactive planning. IBX SmartView presents the data the same way across the globe, providing a single source of truth. A petabyte scale platform at full scale, IBX SmartView processes hundreds of millions of messages per day to provide our customers with on-demand visibility into data center operations with a target end to end processing goal of 60 seconds or less (99^th percentile).

IBX SmartView streaming API is a foundational capability of IBX SmartView, providing customers and Equinix operations and IT teams with low latency, high throughput IBX data center asset data and alert streams over secure, hybrid multi cloud asynchronous channels. Customers can integrate all of their monitoring feeds behind a single pane of glass with the IBX SmartView streaming API, reducing monitoring workload and increasing efficiency.

Source: Equinix

The IBX SmartView API is an integral part of a foundational data center monitoring solution from business, technology and operational perspectives.

Streaming data helps your business become more efficient

IBX SmartView API data streams provide business value in the following ways:

• Reduced monitoring workload: Data center operators can reduce their monitoring workload by integrating data and alert feeds from their Equinix data center deployments with their on-prem infrastructures via this unified monitoring solution. All monitoring can be done through a single pane of glass.
• Transparency into data center conditions: Defining custom alerts on a colocation footprint provides transparency into the operating conditions of the data center.
• Insights for operational efficiency and cost savings: Equinix Operations and IT teams use the data and alert streams to inform advanced analytics and machine learning models that generate insights for predictive planning, operational efficiency and cost savings.

Source: Equinix

Flexibility, access and integration built into the technology

IBX SmartView uses a secure, hybrid multicloud architecture to support streaming APIs. This enables five key technology capabilities that are available through the Equinix Developer portal:

1. Access to historical data: Users have the ability to build a reconciliation mechanism should there be any gaps in data processing over the streaming channel.
2. Access to the entire streaming API life cycle: From provisioning to configuration updates to de-installation, users have self-service access to the entire life cycle.
3. Integration with major cloud providers: The API provides integration with Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure[i] and Private Cloud asynchronous channels to deliver low latency, high throughput streaming data streams to customer applications via a multi-channel and hybrid multicloud model. This enables multiple data streams to be streamed to multiple clouds over different asynchronous channels and/or multiple data streams to be delivered to multiple asynchronous channels in the same cloud. In addition, the streaming API framework uses a pluggable adapter design to extend the data streaming capability to numerous other private and public cloud asynchronous channels.
4. Pull- and push-based integration paradigm: The API supports both push and pull integration with private and public cloud asynchronous channels.
5. Default or customizable formats: Customers can choose to consume their data and alert feeds in the default, standard JSON format or use a plug and play API/SPI model to customize the data format.

Source: Equinix

Constant monitoring ensures a robust, reliable, low-latency feed

From an operational perspective, IBX SmartView near real-time data streams provide several benefits:

• Secure, highly optimized, low latency and high throughput channel. All data streams are optimized to process only the relevant data entities and are delivered to customers over a secure channel that uses a native cloud client driver. The data streaming framework is an elastic, scalable framework built to scale out at a per IBX/per customer level.
• Monitored to ensure high quality data and alert feeds. The Data Quality application continuously monitors data quality, end-to-end latency and IBX data throughput to ensure data streams from IBX SmartView are of high quality and delivered to customers on time. Monitoring ensures issues are identified and addressed proactively.
• Robust, resilient and reliable data and alert feeds. The following components are constantly monitored to ensure quality and reliability:
  • Infrastructure
  • Operating system
  • Container and service mesh
  • Microservices instrumentation
  • Application log
  • Last mile data delivery
• High availability and reliability: As foundational architectural tenets of the API, availability and reliability ensure fault tolerant data and alert feeds.

Source: Equinix

Ready to use on-demand operational visibility streaming in near real time to make your data center monitoring more efficient? Learn more about IBX SmartView or try a free trial.

[1] These capabilities are in beta or under development and are subject to change.