Server Room Environment Monitoring?

WizardX asks: "At my new job we are in the process of starting to Do Things Right(tm). One of these things is putting the computer room (where the IT staff also resides), on its own cooling circuit. We want to monitor and track the temp and humidity in the room. The tracking part makes it more difficult. I really am not familiar with devices to do this. I plan on monitoring with MRTG, so a device that could plug into our network would be nice, but as long as it can dump the data to a computer (*nix or Windows, I really don't care) I will be happy. What have you seen or used?" I think the submitter is looking for something along the line of these devices, but maybe some of you have run into something better?

Host based

[acaird]

Some servers give you this for free. I use Suns (E450s) and they report CPU and environmental temperature. Then I use BigBrother and the temperature larrd module to graph it. BigBrother is at bb4.com and the modules (temp. and larrd) at deadcat.net. It's not fancy, but it was cheap and easy.

Good luck.

Andrew

Buy or build your own

[FattMattP]

If you want to buy a temp sensor which is recommended by the Nagios [nagios.org] people: http://www.sensatronics.com/TempTrax/index.html [sensatronics.com]

If you want to roll your own: http://quozl.netrek.org/ts/ [netrek.org]

I bought the kit for the one on the second link and it works great.

Telaid IP Tattletale

[Finni]

<commercial = on>

I'll have to speak up for our own product here. The IP Tattletale family [telaid.com] is a sysadmin-friendly set of devices for exactly this, and more. The original Tattletale, still sold, is a POTS-line based product with a Central Station contract. This one will fit your needs much better.

It can spit out everything via SNMP; with an add-on license you can even use the device itself to aggregate other SNMP-based devices. For large-scale environments, you can roll your own MRTG or RRDtool configs, or you can buy the IP Tattletale Central, which is a 1U linux box that hold historical data and can push out threshold settings and configs to many Tattletale units.

</commercial>

Yeah, Right.

[Anonymous Coward]

we are in the process of starting to Do Things Right(tm)

Yeah, right. That's why you decided to Ask Slashdot for some bastardized, hacked up, freebie solution. Give me a break.

If you want to handle environmental monitoring and control, and "do it right", then you should be talking to these guys [johnsoncontrols.com] about stuff like this [johnsoncontrols.com] and this [johnsoncontrols.com] and this [johnsoncontrols.com].

Omega Engineering

[Xenu]

Check this page [omega.com] for a cheap ($59), battery operated data logger that records temperature and relative humidity. Stick them whereever you want to collect information. There is a simple Windows program for downloading measurements and configuring the devices over a serial interface.

I have one at home and it works great.