Friends with benefits — in the data center

In the latest issue of Modern Infrastructure, Bob Plankers talks about the potential for IT admins to monitor enterprise systems using social networking tools. At first, it sounds crazy: “What if you were friends with your servers on Facebook?” But such unconventional methods could make it easier to track performance across a variety of systems.

Instead of using an expensive “dashboard” product or relying on pagers, what if you could get updates via Twitter? VMware has demonstrated mapping server relationships with Socialcast, but what if you could set up TweetDeck to watch multiple systems or metrics in real time?

This is no more kludgy than what many administrators have already done, so why not use social media (which everyone’s already checking anyway) to manage machines in the data center?