Surprise incidences of downtime in server rooms and remote wiring closets lead to sleepless nights for many IT managers. Most can recount horror stories about how bad luck, human error, or just simple incompetence brought their server rooms down.

In this paper, Dennis Bouley, senior research analyst at Schneider Electric's Data Centre Science Centre, analyses several of these incidents and makes recommendations for how a basic monitoring system can help reduce the occurrence of these unanticipated events.