# Sen­sors for FreeBSD



## Oko (Oct 10, 2014)

I was wondering what is current state of art in hardware monitoring on FreeBSD? While researching the topic I stumbled on two rather depressing threads:

http://www.leidinger.net/blog/2009/12/0 ... r-freebsd/
http://bsdhwmon.koitsu.org/

The first is the summary failure to port magnificent sensor framework from OpenBSD to FreeBSD. To make matters worse the failure was purely self inflicted political wound.

The second is a sad personal story of another failed attempt also in part caused by political turmoil in FreeBSD camp.

I know that ipmitools work as charm on FreeBSD.


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## Terry_Kennedy (Oct 10, 2014)

Oko said:
			
		

> I was wondering what is current state of art in hardware monitoring on FreeBSD? While researching the topic I stumbled on two rather depressing threads:


I remember both of those. I am using IPMI commands to monitor the hardware here, and send alerts as needed. A static snapshot of one system's monitoring page can be seen here. There's no reason that you can't read the data via IPMI and then make it available via SNMP. Or, some systems have a built-in SNMP interface to their IPMI / remote management facility.


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## Oko (Oct 10, 2014)

Terry_Kennedy said:
			
		

> I remember both of those. I am using IPMI commands to monitor the hardware here, and send alerts as needed. A static snapshot of one system's monitoring page can be seen here. There's no reason that you can't read the data via IPMI and then make it available via SNMP. Or, some systems have a built-in SNMP interface to their IPMI / remote management facility.


Terry those are fantastic screen shoots!!! Could you please explain me how did you get those RRD graphs? Collectd has IMPI plugin but I never got it to work well on Red Hat. OpenBSD doesn't need it as its own SNMP daemon does sensor pooling automatically  :h  How do you pool IPMI with SNMP on FreeBSD?


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## Terry_Kennedy (Oct 10, 2014)

Oko said:
			
		

> Terry those are fantastic screen shoots!!! Could you please explain me how did you get those RRD graphs? Collectd has IMPI plugin but I never got it to work well in Red Hat. How do you pool IPMI with SNMP? I am guessing you are using net-snmp as FreeBSD doesn't have native SNMP daemon.


There's no SNMP involved. I'm running locally-modified versions of the tools included in the contrib directory of the sysutils/ipmitool port. I have it working on both my own RAIDzilla II servers as well as a bunch of assorted Dell PowerEdge servers.

However, since that script runs every 5 minutes, it would be easy to export the data to some file that a SNMP agent could then use, if you need it via SNMP.


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## Oko (Oct 10, 2014)

If the data you collect is rrdtool compliant I am guessing you could just push it to remote server and plot it with a favorite RRD tool or even something like Observium which I use for metric monitoring.


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## Terry_Kennedy (Oct 13, 2014)

Oko said:
			
		

> If the data you collect is rrdtool compliant I am guessing you could just push it to remote server and plot it with a favorite RRD tool or even something like Observium which I use for metric monitoring.


I am plotting it with rrdtool directly from the collected data. That's what's in the contrib directory I mentioned earlier.


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