We have already seen a few ways to monitor our infrastructure with Zabbix. One of the other supported methods of Zabbix is IPMI monitoring. If you still have no clue what we are talking about then maybe ILO or DRAC will tell you more. DRAC is from Dell and stands for Dell Remote Access Controller and ILO is from HP and stands for Integrated Lights-out. Most of these interfaces come in servers as extra cards, and make it possible for us to monitor our hardware directly without the need of an operating system. The server doesn't even need to be turned on to monitor the hardware.
For this topic, you need as usual a properly configured Zabbix server. Make sure you have compiled the server with support included for OpenIPMI. We also need some IPMI capable device, probably a server with a remote management card.
yum install impitool OpenIPMI OpenIPMI-libs
ipmitool -U <ipmi user> -H <IP of ipmi host> -I lanplus -L User sensor
Default
.User
.IPMIagent
.Last thing that we have to change is in the zabbix_server.conf
file. Here we have to uncomment StartIPMIPollers=0
and change the 0
in a value high enough to the number of IPMI devices that we want to monitor.
service zabbix-server restart.
Passwords and pass phrases should not be shown in the frontend so please remind Zabbix about this by voting on this issue!
https://support.zabbix.com/browse/ZBXNEXT-2461.
It is best to open the IPMI with the latest firmware available if possible. Your IPMI device should at least support IPMI v2.0.
Getting IPMI to work is not too difficult but we need to make sure that our server is compiled with OpenIPMI support and that all packages are installed with a version of at least 2.0.14.
By default Zabbix is not configured to start any IPMI pollers, so in our server configuration file, we need to make sure that the IPMI pollers option is active and that enough pollers are set to monitor our IPMI devices. Don't forget to restart the server afterwards.
The IPMI device itself needs to have support for IPMI v2.0. Zabbix needs a user with read access on the IPMI so that it can read the data from the IPMI interface.
In Zabbix we need to make sure that on the host we add an extra interface for IPMI.
In the host tab of our server we need to add an IPMI interface here we need to configure the correct IP address and port.
Zabbix has reported that the OpenIPMI version 2.0.7 is broken and that at least version 2.0.14 is needed to get a working version.
It is possible that your network card also supports IPMI. In this case there is no extra network card and you just have to fill in the same IP address for the IPMI interface.
More sensors can be found by placing Zabbix in debug level 4 and looking for the reading_type
parameter. More information about sensors can be found in the IPMI specifications.
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/servers/ipmi/ipmi-specifications.html.
https://www.zabbix.com/documentation/2.4/manual/config/items/itemtypes/ipmi