"The data center is getting bigger and more complex and so too is the asset inventory. Every new asset has an impact on the day–to–day operations of the data center – from power consumption and problem resolution to capacity planning and change management. To achieve – and maintain – operational excellence, organizations don’t just need to know the location of their data center assets, they need to know if they are over-heating, under–performing or sitting idle."

Facebook is aiming to bring together data from IT, facilities and application development operations to facilitate workflow management and automation for greater operational efficiency of its datacenters. To that end, the company is developing an atypically extensive datacenter management software platform, which it has begun to deploy in some of its facilities. Facebook's datacenter infrastructure management (DCIM) system is 'hybrid' in that it includes both homegrown and commercial components.

IT organizations are increasingly being called upon to cost-effectively deliver reliable support for the entire catalog of business services, or risk outsourcing to a managed service provider. Previously, capacity planners and IT architects would use historical trends to predict capacity requirements and simply over-provision to account for any peaks caused by seasonality, error, or extraneous influences like mergers & acquisitions. Over-provisioning, combined with poor lifecycle management of new resources provisioned in the data center, has led to capacity utilization and inefficiency issues. While historical data is great for understanding past issues and current state of the environment, the performance of servers, hosts and clusters is not linear; at some level of saturation, the performance of that infrastructure will quickly start to degrade.