Diagnosing data center failures

Identifying the cause of a data center failure is the first step in resolving the outage. Once you figure out the issue, you can better understand its impact on your operations and troubleshoot it accordingly.

IBM offers IBM® Control Center as an advanced way to monitor the health and status of Global Mailbox operations. The health status that you receive for your Global Mailbox system notifies you if there are issues in your data centers. You can then drill down into the data centers to view status information about individual servers and their components to troubleshoot the issues.

The data center view within IBM Control Center shows an overview of all the Global Mailbox data centers and details about the individual data center you select. When you view individual data centers, you can see the data center servers, services that they depend upon, and other data centers that share their services. You can also see the connections between these elements. You can click the servers, data centers, and connections in the graphical view to drill into more details. Server icons also display a status badge to denote their state, for example, Down.

You can also click the line that connects a server and a service to get details about the connection from the server point of view or filter the view to show only connections with errors. If a server is having trouble with any service located in another data center, the line connecting that server to the other data center displays in an error state. To get more information about the services located at that data center, you can click the line connecting the server to that data center.

If you do not have IBM Control Center, you can also use information within log files to isolate the failed component.