monitoring ambient temperature with zabbix and ipmitool

By thomas, 23 May, 2012

I wanted to monitor the ambient temperature in my computer room and decided to try using the built in sensors on my servers. ipmitool showed an ambient temperature, so I did some sed to get just the temperature.


[thomas@hotstuff: ~] $ sudo ipmitool sdr type "Temperature" |grep Ambient
Ambient Temp | 08h | ok | 7.1 | 22 degrees C

Some of my machines have multiple Ambient Temperature sensors, I did some looking on the google and the ones marked 7.1 appear to be the one to look at, the rest are power supply temp sensors and show much higher temps.

To have just the ambient temp show I changed the above to:


[thomas@hotstuff: ~] $ sudo ipmitool sdr type "Temperature" |grep Ambient |grep 7.1 |sed -e 's/.*7.1 | \([0-9]\+\).*/\1/'
22

To have this monitored in zabbix, I just put it into zabbix_agentd.conf


UserParameter=ambient.temp,sudo ipmitool sdr type "Temperature" |grep Ambient |grep 7.1 |sed -e 's/.*7.1 | \([0-9]\+\).*/\1/'

After adding ambient.temp to a host and waiting a while I have the following graph. I also set a trigger if ambient.temp > 30.