Server Room Temp Monitoring and Notifications?

Supp0rtLinux asks: "Like many businesses, my server room is a standalone environment from the rest of my building. It has its own UPS, its own survelliance system, and its own AC system powered by its own generator. These are separate from the global building UPS, survelliance, AC, and generator systems and are designed to operate even when the rest of the building is down. However, in my current server room and in others I work with, I find that the AC systems generally lack a network-based notification system. As such, while my server room AC failed at 2am last night and temperature climbed to over 98 degrees, no one was aware until after 8am this morning when the audible alarms were heard. How do other Slashdot readers handle this?"

"I've thought about using some server motherboard with thermal monitoring, but they typically: a) only allow for shutdown at a certain temp, not for warning/email; and b) a well cooled server may not necessarily become excessively hot even if the room heats up. I know some newer AC systems *do* support SMTP notifications, but older ones either do not or are cost-prohibitive add-ons. The very popular Lieberts that are found in the ceilings of many server rooms are a good example of this. Do you know of devices that are network/SMTP capable that can be set with thresholds and alarms and generate emails, pages, or SMS messages when said alarms go off?"

Here you go

Hot Little Therm [spiderplant.com] but see the warning about no longer selling them ... great thermo probes, wish they were still selling them. I am glad I have a few extra.

Weather Duck and Power Egg [itwatchdogs.com]

These ought to do the trick just fine. A bit of configuring or shell scripting, send email to a cell phone or pager or whatever, you should be happy as a clam at high tide.

There are probably others as well. There may even be source code on sourceforge. Hot Little Therm has software. Weather Duck may also.

Hope this helps...

I found a possible low-cost solution to your problem here [hddtemp.com]. It's not exactly what you're looking for, but it could be tailored to help out in your situation, particularly if you choose to monitor a HDD with low utilization, and set the warning temp at just

Re:Hope this helps...

Man, I don't even go home, I am my own monitor! If I get hot, something's wrong... wait, you mean, you guys actually get to go home?

Roll your own :)

1) Get a digital multimeter with RS232 and a temperature probe.
2) Connect it to a small, well-cooled, Linux box (Mini/ITX would be good)
3) Write a quick perl script to poll the DMM every 10 seconds (or something).
4) If current_temp > max_temp { send_mai

Nagios + Websensor

http://www.nagios.org/products/environmental/esens ors/em01b.php [nagios.org]

Doesn't get any easier.

Re:Nagios + Websensor

I want to second this. We do this, and we also pay the alarm people to monitor the temp and humidity as a backup (about are only problem is that, they didn't call use during business hours because they assumed we knew the room was 15F over the agreed upon

Re:Nagios + Websensor

I second this, too. We use Nagios at The Internet Archive, and a trivial Nagios plugin wrapped around /usr/sbin/hddtemp [freshmeat.net] which can be used to monitor the temperature of your servers' hard drives.

Nagios can be made to do any of a variety of things when a

Thermal Cube + Nagios

Build yourself a couple of Thermal Cubes [washington.edu] ($3.50 - $5.00 each), and connect them to a box running Nagios [nagios.org] (which you should be running anyway). Hey presto, temperature monitoring. And you get to play with soldering irons at work, which can be great fun if you act secretive and mutter about overclocking.

Re:Thermal Cube + Nagios

If you don't feel like a do-it-yourselfer, you can buy 1-wire temp sensor boxes from http://ibuttonlink.com./ [ibuttonlink.com.] We did this recently and have been running digitemp from a cron job to log temp and humidity. I'll have to take a look at the nagios plugins to

Nagios and Esensors.

I did this in our server room after the A/C's kept "randomly" shutting off. We use nagios [nagios.org] and the Esensor [eesensors.com]. It's kinda pricey but it's way worth it. There are scripts that will make it integrate directly with Nagios so there's a TON of ways it can alert

mbmon

Cron job. mbmon [kyushu-u.ac.jp]. 5 lines of Perl.

an real-world appliance

I bought a black box that detects power, humidity, and temperature changes and calls me. It's programmable by DTMF, it's cheap, and you can tweak the threshold parameters to your heart's content. The ones I use were purchased from Microtechnologies, Inc. [temperatureguard.com] in CT. It woke me up after a bunch of power outages last night. Some might prefer something more exotic or flexible, but this is quick, dirty, and it works (4+ years).

NetBotz

http://www.netbotz.com/ [slashdot.org].

We use a box from Sensaphone

Our Server room has a small box on the wall that mainly monitors our UPS. It hooks up with alarm wire contacts (normally closed/normally open) And also has a temprature sensor. When an alarm triggers it calls pre-programmed phone numbers in sequence, a

Sensaphone

We use a Sensaphone 1104 (my boss is a real geek). It will dial phone numbers, send pages if certain conditions are met regarding the server room. Sensaphone [sensaphone.com] offers many more products that do similiar tasks.

Alarm Companies

Alarm companies will sell you a monitored service to do just what you want.

That's what we use.

WeatherGoose

We bought a WeatherGoose for one of our server rooms. They are fairly cheap ($399 for the unit) and have many accessories that can be purchased as well as leads for "homebrew"/specialty sensors.

The WeatherGoose has a builtin web server that has (among ot

Tie it into your main building alarm system

Have whomever is in charge of building maintenance install a temperature sensor and remote monitor connection to the building alarm system in your computer room. I did that at the last four facilities I managed. It is a hassle free solution, the monitorin

Sensatronics

Check http://www.sensatronics.com/ [sensatronics.com] They sell very neat network-attached environmental sensors which are very easy to work with.

(Friend works for them)

Digitemp rocks

I use a combo of digitemp, Dallas One-Wire temp probes, RRD, and some Python to glue it together.
http://www.digitemp.com/ [digitemp.com] for the software,
http://www.ibuttonlink.com/ [ibuttonlink.com] to get the hardware.

Serial interface, and you can run sensors hundreds of feet away ov

We just use...

We just use Nagios along with a temperature sensor and a custom-written Nagios plugin. It cost us about $200 in parts and about an hour's worth of labor to write the plugin.

Of course, there is always the esensor [nagios.org], which happens to go on sale tomorrow.

Environmental monitoring

APC sells a monitoring board that goes in some of their UPSses and will do SNMP. Even if you don't need a UPS get one, hook it to your network, and you have your monitor cheaply. Marc

APC

APC makes an inexpensive but very effective monitoring device:

http://www.apc.com/resource/include/techspec_index .cfm?base_sku=AP9319 [apc.com]

I have installed these at multiple sites with great sucess. They do email or SNMP notifications and are manageable through a web interface.

For other factors, put a camera on a Weather Rock.

My local nature center has a very accurate environmental monitoring system. There's a rock outside a window, and a guide which reads:

This is the weather rock.
If you can't see the rock, it's night.
If the rock is wet, it's raining.
If the rock is white, there's been snow.
If the rock is moving, there's a tornado.
If the rock is gone, there was a tornado.

Now, pair one of those babies with a nice Axis network camera....

Roll your own via serial port...

If you have a spare serial port on a server not hooked up already to a UPS for monitoring, use it. Go down to Home Depot or Lowes and purchase a cheap Honeywell round thermostat, and hook it up to the serial port so that it connects CD & DTR or CTS & RTS together when the temperature rises to over whatever temperature you select. Mount the thermostat near wherever the main A/C thermostat is, and label it or cage it appropriately so that nobody touches it (or "fix" it so that it can't be easily mucked with). Write a cron job or equivalent to sense when this event occurs, and if so, send an email and/or begin the shutdown procedure.

Yeah - this may be all low-tech and homebrewish, but it is essentially the exact same thing that a UPS does (albeit with temperature sensing and not voltage level). Also, you can't sue a company if it fails, but considering nothing is being currently done, and you have already had a failure - this would be the easiest and cheapest way to go (a few hours worth of time and a few dollars for parts, tops)...