Server Room Temp Monitoring and Notifications? 93
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Nagios + Websensor (Score:5, Informative)
Doesn't get any easier.
Thermal Cube + Nagios (Score:5, Informative)
an real-world appliance (Score:3, Informative)
NetBotz (Score:3, Informative)
Sensaphone (Score:3, Informative)
Alarm Companies (Score:4, Informative)
That's what we use.
Digitemp rocks (Score:2, Informative)
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 over cat5. Just remember to test the alerts if you roll your own system.
If you want to know more, let me know I'll see what I can do.
Temperature Monitors (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Nagios + Websensor (Score:3, Informative)
Nagios is wonderful. Everytime we have a new type of error, we write a little script to monitor how fast we are approaching that situation and alert, or we write a script to at least alert when it happens, so Nagios will diagnose the problem nearly immediatly if it's not something you can get early warning on (software mirrors breaking for example).
Monitoring for when crond dies, running out of file descriptors, mirrors breaking, and various other problems we've had over time have been scripted up because there wasn't a plugin for it.
Kirby
Environmental monitoring (Score:3, Informative)
APC Environmental Management System (Score:2, Informative)
APC (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.apc.com/resource/include/techspec_inde
I have installed these at multiple sites with great sucess. They do email or SNMP notifications and are manageable through a web interface.
APC Environmental monitoring and MRTG (Score:2, Informative)
I am using the internal card in an APC MasterSwitch, which allows me to control the power, and SNMP/web monitor the temperature (and create MRTG graphs). I also have a script which watches the temp and pages me at x degrees.
Re:Nagios + Websensor (Score:3, Informative)
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 plugin returns a "CRITICAL" status, like send emails, call beepers/cellphones, etc.
-- TTK