Environmental Monitoring

[plexer]

Is anyone using any environmental monitoring solutions in their server rooms for temperature etc...?

I've been looking at a couple of products such as:

http://www.openxtra.co.uk/products/e...e4/prode4.html

and

http://www.climate-monitor.co.uk/

Ben

[pete]

I'm using this method:

http://ssli.ee.washington.edu/people/nomad/thermalcube/

and piping the results into Nagios.

Cost about £30 for the chips and 1-wire serial port adaptor and it meant I finally found a use for all the telephone cable and adapters we have hanging about.

If you don't want to do that, http://www.audon.co.uk/ sell pre-built 1-wire humidity / temperature sensors.

There was a disturbingly helpful Ask Slashdot on the subject as well:

http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?s...643255&tid=215

[plexer]

The E4 and E16 from Openxtra has a nagios plugin available.

Ben

[plexer]

Plus the E4 and 16 connect straight into the network and don't require a host computer.

The climate monitor has options for power usage and door contacts though.

Ben

[plexer]

Well I've found this today:

http://www.myrialog.com/cgi-bin/ic/h...p/hc00015.html

Looks good and easy to connect via cat5 cable to a variety of sensors and the sensors themselves are reasonably priced for direct connection.

Linux software digitemp is compatible I think and it can be integrated into nagios.

http://www.hoppie.nl/tempsens/

This solution looks better than the E16 I was going to buy as I can have loads of temp sensors, humidity and anything else that is 1 wire so a complete building entry system I suppose.

Then I'll take over the world.

Ben

[steve]

We have 2 of the climate-monitoring systems in.

Easy to setup / configure.

Comes with a SMNP MIB so you can use it with any SNMP monitoring software.

[Geoff]

Please expand. I really want a SNMP based solution, so I'm very interested on what you have.

[steve]

I'm writing this as much for myself as for you Geoff - I've never actually documented it, so forgive me if it’s teaching you to suck eggs :-)

We use version 8 of Whats Up Gold

This is how I setup a temperature function to be monitored via SNMP:

First configure climate monitoring device -
IP / SNMP read + write communities / SNMP Trap server IP

On monitoring server (SNMP Trap Server) in Whats up gold:
Setup a new device - the climate monitoring kit.
Get system to poll IP of device via ICMP.
Specify and set to monitor the read + write communities (matching those on monitoring kit)

Within Whats up gold I then setup a service to monitor a SNMP Object ID (which is specific to a particular function on the device)
These are found by integrating the product specific MIB (included with monitoring kit) and exploring the SNMP view.
In this example the built in temperature object ID is 1.3.6.1.4.1.17373.2.2.1.5.1

Then the service can be set to monitor the output of this object id.
I set it to monitor a range of values - between 10 and 20 (oC)
However this could be a constant - ON/OFF on door sensor etc.
Or a rate of change in the value

Whats up gold can then be configured for each device to trigger an alert if anything it is monitoring fails / goes outside of its specified range.

I have the system SMS me if any kit fails, the temp goes out of range also have ups systems to alert if power goes down.

MIBS for most SNMP capable equipment can be found on suppliers support sites, at http://www.mibdepot.com or via the SNMP monitoring software suppliers support sites