Aravolta's workflow view: RMA workflows with status tracking and dependencies across asset validation, maintenance, vendor coordination, and decommissioning.
DCIM is the category of software that puts a data center's assets, power chain, environmental conditions, and capacity in one place. If you run a colo, the gap between what traditional DCIM does and what you need day to day is worth understanding before you buy anything.
The problems DCIM is supposed to solve
Running a colo means working across systems that do not talk to each other: a BMS watching cooling and fire suppression, an EPMS tracking power from the utility feed to the rack PDU, a ticketing system for customer requests, and a spreadsheet (or a CMDB, if you are lucky) that says which customer is in which cage and how much power they are contracted for. When something does not match, someone walks the floor with a clipboard.
DCIM exists because that split causes real problems. You sell a cabinet and find out afterward that the circuit is already at capacity. A cooling unit trips and nobody connects it to the temperature spike three rows over for twenty minutes. A customer asks how much power they used last month and it takes your team half a day to pull the numbers from two systems and reconcile them.
DCIM is supposed to be the one place where you can see assets, power chain, environmental conditions, and capacity, and act on them without switching between five applications.
What traditional DCIM covers
The established DCIM vendors like Nlyte, Sunbird, and Schneider EcoStruxure built their products around two main functions:
- Asset management: what is installed where. Serial numbers, rack positions, network connections, and ownership. It is the floor plan and the asset spreadsheet, digitized.
- Capacity planning: how much power, space, cooling, and network capacity you have left, and when you will run out. It is what lets sales sell cabinets without overcommitting.
Both are useful. If you still track assets in spreadsheets and do capacity math by hand, a traditional DCIM tool will help. But the name "Data Center Infrastructure Management" implies a scope most of these products do not deliver.
Where traditional DCIM stops short
Traditional DCIM products do not manage your infrastructure so much as catalog it, and the difference shows up the first time something trips.
Your day-to-day problems as a colo operator go well beyond knowing what is in a rack:
- Power monitoring and metering: you need live EPMS data to bill customers, catch a circuit heading for its breaker rating before it trips, and check that contracted power matches actual draw. Traditional DCIM may show a power number, but it usually comes from a separate system with a delay.
- Environmental control: your BMS handles HVAC, leak detection, and fire suppression. When a CRAC fails, the response should not start with someone seeing a temperature alarm in one system and switching to another to work out what failed.
- Network visibility: your NOC watches uplinks, cross-connects, and customer circuits. When a customer calls about connectivity, the NOC tools and the facility tools are usually two separate systems.
- Operational workflows: customer onboarding, remote hands, maintenance windows, decommissioning. Each touches assets, power, network, and physical access, and traditional DCIM treats all of it as someone else's problem.
So even with DCIM installed, most colo operators still work across a patchwork of disconnected tools, and the DCIM becomes one more silo instead of the single view it was sold as.
What a modern platform looks like
That gap is why platforms like Aravolta exist. Instead of starting from asset management and bolting on integrations, they bring BMS, EPMS, SCADA, and NOC functions into the same platform as the DCIM features you would expect.
In practice, that means:
- Power data lives with asset data. Open a rack and you see the customer, the contracted capacity, the draw right now, and the trend, without opening a second system.
- Environmental alerts have context. A temperature spike in row 7 is tied to the CRAC serving that zone, and the person on call gets the full picture rather than a number and an alarm code.
- Workflows span systems. A new customer deployment creates tasks for physical access, power provisioning, network cross-connects, and asset registration, and they are tracked in one place instead of across email threads and tickets.
- Capacity is live, not modeled. Available power per circuit, panel, and bus comes from metered data rather than nameplate ratings someone typed in at commissioning three years ago.
Why this matters for colo specifically
An enterprise data center and a colo run differently. Enterprise IT manages its own equipment in its own space. A colo operator manages shared infrastructure for dozens or hundreds of customers, each with their own SLA, power contract, and access rules.
Multi-tenancy means you care about things enterprise DCIM was never built for: per-customer power billing, access control tied to cage assignments, a customer portal that shows each tenant its own environment, and proof of SLA compliance when a customer disputes an outage.
Most traditional DCIM tools were designed for the enterprise case and assume one organization owns all the equipment. Bending them to multi-tenant colo usually means workarounds, custom fields, and a lot of manual process around the edges.
Key takeaways
- DCIM is software for managing data center assets, power, cooling, and capacity in one place
- Traditional DCIM (Nlyte, Sunbird, EcoStruxure) focuses on asset management and capacity planning
- Colo operators need more than cataloging: they need BMS, EPMS, SCADA, and NOC data tied together
- Platforms like Aravolta bring these systems in natively rather than as add-ons
- Multi-tenant operations have requirements that enterprise-focused DCIM was not designed for
Frequently asked questions
Do I need DCIM if I already have a BMS and EPMS?
A BMS and an EPMS handle building systems and power metering. They do not track assets, customer contracts, or capacity, and DCIM fills that gap. The question is whether your DCIM should pull in BMS and EPMS data directly or leave you switching between systems. Traditional DCIM keeps them separate; platforms like Aravolta bring them together.
How is DCIM different from a CMDB?
A CMDB (configuration management database) is a record of IT assets and their relationships. DCIM includes asset tracking but also covers the physical and electrical plant: power chains, floor layouts, cooling zones, and environmental monitoring. A CMDB is a catalog; DCIM adds the physical world on top of it.
We have 200 cabinets. Is that too small for DCIM?
No. The pain of disconnected systems shows up long before you reach thousands of cabinets. If your team spends time reconciling power data between systems, checking capacity by hand before sales commits, or chasing asset details across spreadsheets, the problem is the complexity of your operation, not its size.
What's wrong with using spreadsheets for capacity management?
A spreadsheet goes stale the moment someone forgets to update it. It also cannot pull live power data, so capacity numbers rest on contracted or nameplate values rather than actual draw. You end up either overcommitting circuits or leaving sellable capacity idle, and the bigger the facility, the faster the spreadsheet drifts from reality.
How long does a DCIM deployment typically take?
Traditional DCIM deployments from the big vendors can take six to twelve months, mostly because of the data entry needed to model your infrastructure. Platforms like Aravolta are built to connect directly to your existing BMS and EPMS rather than have you rebuild your infrastructure by hand in a new system, which is how they get to useful data within days.
Can DCIM help with customer power billing?
Traditional DCIM tools generally do not handle billing. They may show power data, but turning it into invoices means exporting it and processing it somewhere else. Platforms built for colo, like Aravolta, tie metering data to customer contracts, so the invoice reflects what the meter recorded and nobody has to reconcile it by hand.
Where to start
If you are evaluating DCIM for a colo, start by listing the systems your team switches between every day: BMS, EPMS, ticketing, asset tracking, customer portal. Then ask each vendor how they handle each one. If the answer is "we have an API" across the board, you will be building the integrations yourself. If those systems are native to the platform, you are looking at something closer to what a colo needs.
Last updated March 2026