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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?
I think Netbotz are the best I've seen so far. I have used them in multiple server rooms for security as well as monitoring. They have temp, humidity, a camera, and are web-enabled. Very sweet!
Check these out
Good luck.
Andrew
Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely. E. Tufte
- Texas Weather Instruments
- Oregon Scientific
- Davis Vantage
- etc.
Plugs in to a computer, logs just fine, and you can post your results to wundergroundNetBotz are the best-known and most fully-featured system, but they're kind of pricey.
A cheaper alternative is APC's solution while providing just the environment info you want.
If you are also looking into remote power management, Server Technology's Power Tower product is being integrated with a new environmental device (for $100-200 or so, according to reports) which allows you to keep your interactions and monitoring all on one interface for environmental and power both.
UserAdvocate: The voice of the user
We use APC Ups's in the server rooms I maintain. They have SmartSlot slot built into all rackmount systems that can have a network managment card put into it.
_ sku=SU3000RM3U&totalwatts=50#
They pull SNMP data from the UPS as well as tempature information from the room.
Check it out: http://apcc.com/products/configure/index.cfm?base
Check out Mon and Mon.cgi
I believe this startup will be producing just the sort of products you're looking for :-)
-psy
If you want to roll your own: http://quozl.netrek.org/ts/
I bought the kit for the one on the second link and it works great.
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
I currently use digitemp to monitor the temperature in my computer room using Dallas Semiconductor DS18S20 temperature sensors. I had thought that they also had iButtons that also monitored humidity, but I don't see them now.
At my work, we built a humidity & temperature monitoring system using Modicon PLCs (Programmable Logic Controllers) which was used in Steinway Piano's manufacturing center. It monitored the temp/humidty of several rooms, and had some alarming & logging facilities.
You could do this with a Momentum PLC (one of the low-end of Modicons product lines) and a humidity sensor or two. For the PLC, you would need an I/O base and either a CPU module (which plugs into the I/O base)if you want to perform logic in the PLC (i.e., if signal #1 is greater than Value #1 for a time longer than Time#1, turn on Output#1, or something like that), or an Ethernet adapter, which will let you grab the data remotely with a client program.
See: www.modicon.com
www.modbus.org
You're sitting in the room. I think the monitoring part is handled. You can use your trusty skin for that. If you feel hot, chances are your systems do too. You even have a redundant monitoring system if you have co-workers in the room. :)
MRTG is great for tracking. Almost any decent piece of network-connected hardware will have a temperature sensor in it that can be polled via SNMP (which MRTG uses by default). It's just a little more complicated than the default setup. Be careful though, I've been monitoring four Extreme switches internal temperature this way, and the accuracy of 24-port ones varies widely while the 48-port ones are dead on. --Matt
It's generally a temperature/humidity sensor with pens that record data to a card.
They're cheap, effective and don't break.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
IMS-4000's for all of our environmental alarms and much of our system heartbeat monitoring. We still have to use IPsentry for specialized probes (finger and https mostly) but it is a very cool system. If you use it, remember to record useful error messages, unless you know what IP goes with what device for everything on your network that the device does by default.
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The one we use doesn't report info. to a computer, but there may be other models available here that do. The one we use cost about $200US and calls up to three phone numbers with an automated message, letting you know that a low/high temp. has been reached, that the power went out, or that the battery backup is low.
Trolls lurk everywhere. Mod them down.
I'll have to speak up for our own product here. The IP Tattletale family 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.
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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 about stuff like this and this and this.
You might want to look at Pinnacle Datalogger, which has an ethernet jack and an IP stack, and a web interface, etc... It does temp and humidity.
11*43+456^2
NAGIOS is an opensource network monitoring system, they have some links on their site for ethernet connected temperature probe devices.
I recommend putting trays of popcorn on top of each rack-mount server. You can spot which ones are too hot almost immediately and get some needed brain food during the subsequent troubleshooting. The unbeatable feature of this monitoring method is the use of high-reliability redundant data paths. Visual, aural, and olfactory transmission methods are all employed to their fullest advantage.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Seriously, get an EE intern. I had to build simple systems like this in college using a National Instruments interface board and some basic thermostats, humidistats, and even digital photo-eyes. You can write a simple LabView program to read in the data and output it to a database. Total cost would be ~$500 in hardware (assuming you have a server somewhere that has a spare parallel/com port in the room). You can place the devices anywhere in the room and run the wires back to the interface board. You can even place multiple devices of each in various places around the room for 3D modelling of the temp/humidity.
Nothing fails quite like prayer.
no your not,
You just think you are.
I went through this several times with my company.
3 times now they told me they are willing to invest in the future and make a drastic change for the better.
Every time Management Starts off really gunhoe on the idea, then inevitably the schedule shrinks, the design changes at the last second, and everything looks worse than it did when we started.
any way the point of the my post is
Don't trust anyone in as suit!
Management may say you have my full suport right now but 2 seconds later they are going to change there mind and you will be left mop up there shit.
so yah, just so I can turn this into a bitter
FUCK Managment.
I have one at home and it works great.
I will make you one cheap(about $100) And as a side benefit you can control an Etch-A-Sketch with it. But seriously the Rabbit semiconductor core modules are very cool. For $40 you get an ethernet port with a free (beer not speech) TCP/IP stack, 4 serial ports and 8 general purpose I/O's
Free cell phone tracking
Just saw this advertised in a magazine at lunch:
Weather Duck.
It needs a PC to run its software but seems to fit your bill, especially SNMP for MRTG. I would imagine any old junky PC would be just fine.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Check out iButtons, at least for temperature
monitoring.
-- Titus Brown
You should also have fire suppression and liquid detection systems. The liquid detection systems are pretty cool. A sensor cable runs all around the floor and zones are mapped on the wall. If you get a leak under the floor (from the chillers, for example) you get an alarm and the panel indicates the zone where you need to start pulling tiles.
for me I use a APC Enviornmental card which is plugged into my smart UPS 1000, hooked up to my system via NUT, I then use a perl script to extract the data and send it to mrtg. the same script connects to weather.com and grabs the local weather as well, see the sample. this monitors just my living room, I don't have a job at the moment so I don't have an official server room, just a living room with about 20 systems.
Why do you have people in the same room with servers?
How are you restricting access to your computer room?
Why are you not getting in touch with professional people?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.