© Vladimir Nenov, 123RF.com
Monitoring server hardware with the Nagios IPMI plugin
Server Check
Nagios and the Nagios fork Icinga have proven their value as software service monitors in recent years. So far, server hardware monitoring has been a complicated process that relied on vendor-specific plugins. The new IPMI plugin v2 supports simple monitoring, even in heterogeneous server landscapes. To do so, the plugin monitors all the IPMI hardware sensors for temperature, fan speed, power supply status, and many others.
IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface) was introduced in 1998 as a cross-vendor server management standard by Intel, HP, NEC, and Dell. The current IPMI 2.0 specifically dates to 2004 and is supported by most recent server systems.
Entry-level servers often need an option such as a hardware extension card or a special mainboard variant for IPMI support. But, for all others, IPMI is typically standard equipment [1].
The heart of the IPMI specification is the Baseboard Management Controller (BMC), which uses the network or a local system bus to talk to userspace programs on one side and is linked to numerous hardware sensors in the server on the other. The BMC needs a separate IP address to communicate on the network. Once the server is connected to the power supply, the BMC boots automatically – regardless of whether the server itself is running.
Widespread IPMI support in the server sector provides ideal conditions for writing a Nagios plugin for simple and standardized server hardware monitoring. I released the initial version of my IPMI Sensor Monitoring plugin in October 2009.
In the background, the plugin relies on IPMItool to query the IPMI sensors. The plugin went to version 2.0 just recently and now has ipmimonitoring by FreeIPMI running in the background. The move from IPMItool to FreeIPMI was necessary to support digital (discrete) sensors in addition to analog (threshold) sensors in a reliable way. FreeIPMI is now included by
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