Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI)

Plugin: freeipmi.plugin Module: freeipmi

Overview

“Monitor enterprise server sensor readings, event log entries, and hardware statuses to ensure reliable server operations.”

The plugin uses open source library IPMImonitoring to communicate with sensors.

This collector is supported on all platforms.

This collector supports collecting metrics from multiple instances of this integration, including remote instances.

The plugin needs setuid.

Default Behavior

Auto-Detection

This integration doesn’t support auto-detection.

Limits

The default configuration for this integration does not impose any limits on data collection.

Performance Impact

Linux kernel module for IPMI can create big overhead.

Setup

Prerequisites

Install freeipmi.plugin

When using our official DEB/RPM packages, the FreeIPMI plugin is included in a separate package named netdata-plugin-freeipmi which needs to be manually installed using your system package manager. It is not installed automatically due to the large number of dependencies it requires.

When using a static build of Netdata, the FreeIPMI plugin will be included and installed automatically, though you will still need to have FreeIPMI installed on your system to be able to use the plugin.

When using a local build of Netdata, you need to ensure that the FreeIPMI development packages (typically called libipmimonitoring-dev, libipmimonitoring-devel, or freeipmi-devel) are installed when building Netdata.

Preliminary actions

If you have not previously used IPMI on your system, you will probably need to run the ipmimonitoring command as root to initialize IPMI settings so that the Netdata plugin works correctly. It should return information about available sensors on the system.

Configuration

File

The configuration file name for this integration is netdata.conf. Configuration for this specific integration is located in the [plugin:freeipmi] section within that file.

The file format is a modified INI syntax. The general structure is:

[section1]
    option1 = some value
    option2 = some other value

[section2]
    option3 = some third value

You can edit the configuration file using the edit-config script from the Netdata config directory.

cd /etc/netdata 2>/dev/null || cd /opt/netdata/etc/netdata
sudo ./edit-config netdata.conf

Options

The configuration is set using command line options:

# netdata.conf
[plugin:freeipmi]
  command options = opt1 opt2 ... optN

To display a help message listing the available command line options:

./usr/libexec/netdata/plugins.d/freeipmi.plugin --help

Name	Description	Default	Required
SECONDS	Data collection frequency.		no
debug	Enable verbose output.	disabled	no
no-sel	Disable System Event Log (SEL) collection.	disabled	no
reread-sdr-cache	Re-read SDR cache on every iteration.	disabled	no
interpret-oem-data	Attempt to parse OEM data.	disabled	no
assume-system-event-record	treat illegal SEL events records as normal.	disabled	no
ignore-non-interpretable-sensors	Do not read sensors that cannot be interpreted.	disabled	no
bridge-sensors	Bridge sensors not owned by the BMC.	disabled	no
shared-sensors	Enable shared sensors if found.	disabled	no
no-discrete-reading	Do not read sensors if their event/reading type code is invalid.	enabled	no
ignore-scanning-disabled	Ignore the scanning bit and read sensors no matter what.	disabled	no
assume-bmc-owner	Assume the BMC is the sensor owner no matter what (usually bridging is required too).	disabled	no
hostname HOST	Remote IPMI hostname or IP address.	local	no
username USER	Username that will be used when connecting to the remote host.		no
password PASS	Password that will be used when connecting to the remote host.		no
noauthcodecheck / no-auth-code-check	Don’t check the authentication codes returned.		no
driver-type IPMIDRIVER	Specify the driver type to use instead of doing an auto selection. The currently available outofband drivers are LAN and LAN_2_0, which perform IPMI 1.5 and IPMI 2.0 respectively. The currently available inband drivers are KCS, SSIF, OPENIPMI and SUNBMC.		no
sdr-cache-dir PATH	SDR cache files directory.	/tmp	no
sensor-config-file FILE	Sensors configuration filename.	system default	no
sel-config-file FILE	SEL configuration filename.	system default	no
ignore N1,N2,N3,…	Sensor IDs to ignore.		no
ignore-status N1,N2,N3,…	Sensor IDs to ignore status (nominal/warning/critical).		no
-v	Print version and exit.		no
–help	Print usage message and exit.		no

Examples

Decrease data collection frequency

Basic example decreasing data collection frequency. The minimum update every is 5 (enforced internally by the plugin). IPMI is slow and CPU hungry. So, once every 5 seconds is pretty acceptable.

[plugin:freeipmi]
  update every = 10

Disable SEL collection

Append to command options = the options you need.

[plugin:freeipmi]
  command options = no-sel

Ignore specific sensors

Specific sensor IDs can be excluded from freeipmi tools by editing /etc/freeipmi/freeipmi.conf and setting the IDs to be ignored at ipmi-sensors-exclude-record-ids.

However this file is not used by libipmimonitoring (the library used by Netdata’s freeipmi.plugin).

To find the IDs to ignore, run the command ipmimonitoring. The first column is the wanted ID:

ID | Name | Type | State | Reading | Units | Event 1 | Ambient Temp | Temperature | Nominal | 26.00 | C | ‘OK’ 2 | Altitude | Other Units Based Sensor | Nominal | 480.00 | ft | ‘OK’ 3 | Avg Power | Current | Nominal | 100.00 | W | ‘OK’ 4 | Planar 3.3V | Voltage | Nominal | 3.29 | V | ‘OK’ 5 | Planar 5V | Voltage | Nominal | 4.90 | V | ‘OK’ 6 | Planar 12V | Voltage | Nominal | 11.99 | V | ‘OK’ 7 | Planar VBAT | Voltage | Nominal | 2.95 | V | ‘OK’ 8 | Fan 1A Tach | Fan | Nominal | 3132.00 | RPM | ‘OK’ 9 | Fan 1B Tach | Fan | Nominal | 2150.00 | RPM | ‘OK’ 10 | Fan 2A Tach | Fan | Nominal | 2494.00 | RPM | ‘OK’ 11 | Fan 2B Tach | Fan | Nominal | 1825.00 | RPM | ‘OK’ 12 | Fan 3A Tach | Fan | Nominal | 3538.00 | RPM | ‘OK’ 13 | Fan 3B Tach | Fan | Nominal | 2625.00 | RPM | ‘OK’ 14 | Fan 1 | Entity Presence | Nominal | N/A | N/A | ‘Entity Present’ 15 | Fan 2 | Entity Presence | Nominal | N/A | N/A | ‘Entity Present’ …

freeipmi.plugin supports the option ignore that accepts a comma separated list of sensor IDs to ignore. To configure it set on netdata.conf:

[plugin:freeipmi]
      command options = ignore 1,2,3,4,...

Metrics

Metrics grouped by scope.

The scope defines the instance that the metric belongs to. An instance is uniquely identified by a set of labels.

The plugin does a speed test when it starts, to find out the duration needed by the IPMI processor to respond. Depending on the speed of your IPMI processor, charts may need several seconds to show up on the dashboard.

Per Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) instance

These metrics refer to the entire monitored application.

This scope has no labels.

Metrics:

Metric	Dimensions	Unit
ipmi.sel	events	events

Per sensor

Labels:

Label	Description
sensor	The sensor name
type	One of 45 recognized sensor types (Battery, Voltage…)
component	One of 25 recognized components (Processor, Peripheral).

Metrics:

Metric	Dimensions	Unit
ipmi.sensor_state	nominal, critical, warning, unknown	state
ipmi.sensor_temperature_c	temperature	Celsius
ipmi.sensor_temperature_f	temperature	Fahrenheit
ipmi.sensor_voltage	voltage	Volts
ipmi.sensor_ampere	ampere	Amps
ipmi.sensor_fan_speed	rotations	RPM
ipmi.sensor_power	power	Watts
ipmi.sensor_reading_percent	percentage	%

Alerts

The following alerts are available:

Alert name	On metric	Description
ipmi_sensor_state	ipmi.sensor_state	IPMI sensor ${label:sensor} (${label:component}) state