One of my readers, Vivek sent a link to a cool robot used in the data center to collect thermal profile data. You could have permanent thermal sensors in your data center or have someone wander around to collect data or send a robot around. Having the robot go around 24x7x365 a year seems like a good choice, and given it is built on iRobot you have a clean floor too. :-)

This idea is to build a low cost platform to monitor environmental parameters in a data center. We initially planned to take an arduino with DS18B20 temp sensors around & build a temperature map of the data center. But we need to take care of the indoor location information as well with this method. That looked tedious & error prone. It is a good thermal detector but not good to build a thermal map. So we brainstormed with our team and some one joked about putting it on a Roomba & driving it around. The idea looked frugal because either you can put hundreds of sensors in your data center or take few sensors & walk around. Both are different in technical perspective but the later approach which is very low cost & good enough for quick data center cooling fixes.

I had a chance to have an e-mail discussion with Vivek and one of questions I had is how he knows where the robot is in the data center. The answer. They know the start point, and they know the wheel movement which then creates a path of where the robot is. But, if the robot is kicked, then the location is unknown.

Seems like this is a good project for a summer intern to try at your data center.

Here is a video of the robot.