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.
WeatherGoose (Score:2)
Re:Here you go (Score:2)
One note of caution on the Power Egg - they aren't UL listed, and the construction of them seems.. well, not that great. We ordered a couple with L5 30amp ends and after a few weeks decided we didn't want to trust our power to something that hasn't been certified - not to mention the lawyers told us that if there was a fire due to them that it wouldn't be covered. So buyer beware on that!
But our Weather Goose has yet
Code for Weatherduck (Score:2)
We've written some self-rolled C code and Perl scripts to pull data from the Weatherduck, stuff it into a Postgres database, and trigger an alarm if the temperature or humidity get outside a certain range. Here's a link to our CVSWeb [earlham.edu].
The basic procedure is that you pipe output from monitor into db_interface, and then run alert as a separate process. You can use the CGI script to generate GNUPlot [gnuplot.info] graphs from a web form, or you can invoke it directly with graph.
Hope this helps... (Score:2)
I found a possible low-cost solution to your problem here [hddtemp.com]. It's not exactly what you're looking for, but it could be tailored to help out in your situation, particularly if you choose to monitor a HDD with low utilization, and set the warning temp at just a few degrees above the highest temp it normally hits when the AC is operational.
Hope this helps....I'm thinking I might hit up my supervisor for this software as well...there's certainly no harm in being careful.
Re:Hope this helps... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Hope this helps... (Score:2)
This solution just uses SMART, which you should be watching anyway. I'm not sure if their product is any good, but you should evaluate it. If it isn't a simple ruby/python script can get that info (We have written such things here). You need to be monitoring each drive anyway, since it is nice to replace them before they fail.
Roll your own :) (Score:2)
2) Connect it to a small, well-cooled, Linux box (Mini/ITX would be good)
3) Write a quick perl script to poll the DMM every 10 seconds (or something).
4) If current_temp > max_temp { send_mail(); }
It's cheap, AND you get to play with Mini ITX linux boxes at work
Re:Roll your own :) (Score:2)
The multimeter solution is pretty geeky though. (And you can... uh... measure the AC line voltage and have the server notify you when the power goes out
Re:Roll your own :) (Score:2)
You could use the lmsensors package to notify you if the heat goes to high.
seems like as good a solution as any.
Other options would be a Dallas one-wire sensor network interfaced to a Linux or windows box. You could have multi able temperature as well as other sensors interfaced to your network that way. Like, humidity or doors. You could also use the digital out to trigger a loud alarm.
He
Nagios + Websensor (Score:5, Informative)
Doesn't get any easier.
Re:Nagios + Websensor (Score:1)
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
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
Re:Nagios + Websensor (Score:1)
Sensaphone (Score:1)
Re:Sensaphone (Score:2)
Thermal Cube + Nagios (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Thermal Cube + Nagios (Score:2)
Re:Thermal Cube + Nagios (Score:2)
Thanks
Nagios and Esensors. (Score:2)
--Ajay
Re:Nagios and Esensors. (Score:1)
mbmon (Score:2)
an real-world appliance (Score:3, Informative)
NetBotz (Score:3, Informative)
Re:NetBotz (Score:1)
After having one too many holidays runied by failed air conditioners I bought two of them, one for each server room. They come with temp and airflow sensors, microphones, cameras, all sorts of great stuff. You configure it with a web interface to alert you on various threshholds, from temp to airflow to motion on the camera to loud noises, and it can page you, email you, etc.
I just made sure that it was position
Re:NetBotz (Score:1)
We use a box from Sensaphone (Score:2)
Sensaphone (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Sensaphone (Score:1)
I've got one of those too.
Ours monitors temperature and water, although sadly the only time the server room flooded (due to a leaky air-conditioning unit) the water sensor wasn't located near the wet areas.
The device plugs into the mains and can be programmed to telephone a list of numbers on alert conditions.
The unit also has backup batteries which will allow it to make a call in case of power outage - although in our case with a digitial phone system I suspect that wouldn't work ..
Simple to use, and r
Re:Sensaphone (Score:2)
Alarm Companies (Score:4, Informative)
That's what we use.
Re:Alarm Companies (Score:2)
Alarm companies will sell you a monitored service to do just what you want. That's what we use.
That's what we use too. Best of all, if I don't answer the phone, they'll send the police over to cool down that server room!
Re:Alarm Companies (Score:2)
WeatherGoose (Score:2)
The WeatherGoose has a builtin web server that has (among other things) an xml feed...this makes writing scripts to interpret the data a breeze...not to mention it has a builtin "pager" alarm that will email and address whenever an alarm is tripped (high temp for instance)...
IT WatchDogs [itwatchdogs.com]
Tie it into your main building alarm system (Score:2)
That way, you can go on vacation! Too many homebrew solutions end up being dependent on the sysadm being available. Vacations are nice! Try to remove anythin
Have a plan for when the alarm goes off. (Score:2)
That also removes anything preventing them from giving you a loooooong vacation too. Remember: If your job is so automated you can do it from the deli, your job is also so automated they can do it from Delhi.
And a note about contact lists: If you have more than two people getting the notifications, you should have a 'war room' voice bridge set up, so all the involved people can call in and figure out which one's going to get out
Re:Have a plan for when the alarm goes off. (Score:2)
That is the least of my worries. Too much of sysadm work is hands-on and cannot be done remotely. I run two sites; one in California and one in Pennsylvania. I have done as much as I can to allow remote administration of the other site, given financial and time constrants. However, I still need
Sensatronics (Score:2)
(Friend works for them)
Re:Sensatronics (Score:2)
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.
Check your router (Score:1)
We just use... (Score:2)
We just use Nagios along with a temperature sensor and a custom-written Nagios plugin. It cost us about $200 in parts and about an hour's worth of labor to write the plugin.
Of course, there is always the esensor [nagios.org], which happens to go on sale tomorrow.
One approach (Score:1)
Re:One approach (Score:1)
Netbotz (Score:2)
http://www.netbotz.com/ [netbotz.com]
Re:Netbotz (Score:2)
Temperature Monitors (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Temperature Monitors (Score:1)
Re:Temperature Monitors (Score:2)
Extremely easy to set up. I just poll it via http with a script and update an rrdtool graph. I generate a pager alert if the temperature is too high.
Next day the AC failed again (on a Friday evening no less) but the pager called me when I was just a couple miles from the office. Disaster averted.
Re:Temperature Monitors (Score:2)
Security system. (Score:1)
- have the AC kick in automatically when it's too hot,
- have the heater kick in when it's too cold
- if for some reason these systems don't kick in, a temperature sensor installed and monitored by the security systems sets off an alarms.
So, for us, the same security co
Environmental monitoring (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Environmental monitoring (Score:2)
An Entertaining Solution... (Score:2)
You can get a lot more than room temperature monitoring, if you want. I use a Davis Instruments [weathertools.com] weather station to monitor server room temperature as well as outside temperature, wind speed+direction, humidity, barometer, etc.
I use the Davis Weather Monitor II station, which can be picked up [weathertools.com] for about $350. Controlling the station from *NIX couldn't be more simple. I use the Device::WxM2 [cpan.org] Perl module to pull data from my station. I wrote a small daemon that stores the data in RRDtool [ee.ethz.ch] data files, as wel
APC Environmental Management System (Score:2, Informative)
Re:APC Environmental Management System (Score:2, Insightful)
simple (Score:2)
AKCP products (Score:1)
sensorsoft (Score:2)
http://www.sensorsoft.com/st6105c.html
Solaris temperature monitoring/notification (Score:2)
One nice thing about host monitoring is that if you lose a fan or have some localized cooling issue, you will know about it this way, rather than via a whole-room temperature monitor. There are certainly scalability issues with doing per-host monitoring though.
rely on hdd temperature (Score:2)
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.
RS-232 Thermometer and SMS / email (Score:1)
Another (Score:2)
This plug and go package has everything you need to protect rooms and equipment from temperature problems using a network enabled Windows NT/2000/XP/2003 machine. All software runs as Windows services.
It can alert you via email, pager and run commands when temperature goes outside your set limits.
The graphing tool allows you to graph temperature data from a web browser.
This package includes the ST6105C Sensorsoft Thermometer, RWME Remote Watchman Enterpris
APC (Score:1)
http://apc.com/products/category.cfm?id=7&subid=2
They monitor temp and humidity among other things and include customisable relays, threasholds, remote access, and email monitoring.
IPSentry (Score:2)
For other factors, put a camera on a Weather Rock. (Score:3, Funny)
This is the weather rock.
If you can't see the rock, it's night.
If the rock is wet, it's raining.
If the rock is white, there's been snow.
If the rock is moving, there's a tornado.
If the rock is gone, there was a tornado.
Now, pair one of those babies with a nice Axis network camera....
uptimedevices.com (Score:1)
The one thing I'd tell you to do is the trending. It's great to be able to look at the RRD plots and say, "I see the temperature goes up 3 degrees at night, I'll have to talk to the facilities people".
KMC (Score:1)
use your ups (Score:1)
Temp monitor (Score:2)
I'm sure it could be done in Linux too, but the machines I was working with were Win98 workstations. If you ca
Nagios tools (Score:2)
Jakarta SP2 (Score:1)
Roll your own via serial port... (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah - this may be all low-tech and homebrewish, but it is essentially the exact same thing that a UPS does (albeit with temperature sensing and not voltage level). Also, you can't sue a company if it fails, but considering nothing is being currently done, and you have already had a failure - this would be the easiest and cheapest way to go (a few hours worth of time and a few dollars for parts, tops)...
AKCP sensorProbe (Score:2)
We picked up an 8 sensor model of the AKCP sensorProbe a while back. I don't recall it being particularly expensive and it seems to work very well. It's got 8 ports on it, into which you can plug a variety of different sensors. Sensors can be things like temperature, water, AC voltage, smoke, motion, etc. The sensors all terminate in normal RJ45 connectors, so it's pretty easy to reuse existing wiring infrastructure to get your sensors wherever you need them.
It has a web interface for configuration with
APC Environmental Monitor (Score:1)
Read my article in an upcoming issue of MAKE (Score:2)
-marc
Netbotz monitoring appliances (Score:1)
You can get models with cameras, motion detectors, etc.
PCMeasure Ethernetbox (Score:2)
We are using one of them, together with a simple Perl script that runs on a Linux PC. The script reads out the data from the Ethernetbox, sends Email alerts, makes nice graphs with RRDTool, and even will run an automatic shutdown if the temperature gets critical.