Server room environment monitoring

[tobiasclarity]

Hi All,

 

We are looking to purchase environment monitors for both our server rooms i just wondered what those who are using them have gone with. APC Netbotz looks good but quite pricey and i have been looking at Geist this morning of which looks great and not a bad price however i dont know much about them

 

Any advice or pointers would be appreciated

[pete]

We have an Netbotz Rackmonitor 200. It's not bad, but you'll spend a few days (set alerting thresholds, wait 24hrs to see if appropriate, adjust, wait...) tweaking it. Unless your server room is properly sealed, you may find you need "winter" and "summer" thresholds.

[Chris_]

We use Ubiquiti mFi with a temperature/humidity sensor in our server room. Pretty cheap hardware but it's not a self contained system, the management software needs to be running on a server for all the logging/alerting.

[manc_techie]

I'm using the AVTech 12R and AVTech 32E for temperature, humidity, airflow, power and cabinet doors (some of our cabinets have shared estates kit in).

 

Never had any issues and the central device manager is easy to use

[manc_techie]

I'm using the AVTech 12R and AVTech 32E for temperature, humidity, airflow, power and cabinet doors (some of our cabinets have shared estates kit in).

 

Never had any issues and the central device manager is easy to use

[fairm010]

We use Ubiquiti mFi too and as said above the controller has to run on a server. Shame as just migrated our Unifi controller to a 'Cloud Key' so would be useful if that could run mFi too!

[CAWJames]

What are you actually wanting to monitor? If it's just temperature, we have a Pi 3 with 2 temperature sensors(DS18B20 off the top of my head), one for ambient in the room temp and one in the air flow from the chiller, so we can calculate a differential and pre-empt when the chiller is not blowing cold air and hopefully get to the room and sort before it hits 30 degrees and things start to cook! Basically it has a round robin database(RRDTool) that polls the sensors on an interval, and then sends that data to Xively (an IoT platform that uses HTTP posts to log data), then triggers fire off emails if certain conditions are met("Get to the server room, you lazy IT monkey, it's over 23 degrees in there at the moment" type thing). Just needs power, as the 3 is wifi enabled. I would assume if you can get humidity and other sensors to go on the GPIO pins, it would also log what ever you wanted to where-ever you wanted as well. Pretty easy to setup and parts were less than £50 including the Pi

[kearton]

We use a GEIST product and I'm very happy with it. Have also connected reed switches on the office doors and windows, and water sensors (as we've had a couple of floods)

https://www.edugeek.net/showthread.php?t=113932

Edited March 2, 2017 by kearton

[Sagima]

We just have an APC environmental monitor in each server rooms plugged into a UPSs. We only track temp and humidity.

[ITGURU]

I'm just using the APC temperature monitoring on my UPS units with email notifications to both work and home email address.

I've found the threshold which works all year round - I have 2 air con units in the server room for redundancy, and the settings are spot on whereby even if one of the air con units fails (or switches off randomly) it will increase the temp by just a couple of degrees, enough to notify me.