Data channels of a computer system may be remotely monitored to detect data channel degradation. A monitoring agent on a client may execute script commands on the remote computer system to monitor input/output (I/O) rates of a set of channels. The monitoring agent may compute an average data rate of the data channels and compare the I/O rate of each channel to the average. When the I/O rate of a channel falls below the average by at least a threshold amount, an alert may be generated to indicate to an administrator a possible failure with the data channel.