[CentOS] Suggestion for Server Room monitoring

Mon Feb 16 03:45:48 UTC 2009
Ian Forde <ian at duckland.org>

On Mon, 2009-02-16 at 09:59 +0800, Fajar Priyanto wrote:
> Hi all,
> I have a situation like this:
> Our little server room is always on. It has an air conditioning unit,
> but barely enough.
> So sometimes during weekend, the temperature could reach unhealthy
> level, like 29 degree Celsius.
> Currently, there's no personnel to monitor it 24 hours a day.
> I'm thinking of using a tool to monitor the temperature, and then send
> sms/email when it reaches certain threshold.
> Anyone has an idea? Could be software based or hardware one.
> Thank you.

If you've got an APC UPS, there's a chance you can get a temperature
sensor that attaches to it.  That can be checked from Nagios, which can
send alerts when thresholds are reached.  You can also graph temperature
over time (via SNMP) using Cacti, so that you can verify that Nagios is
doing the right thing.  Note that even if you use lm_sensors rather than
an external temperature sensor[1], it's still a good idea to use Nagios
and/or Cacti in conjunction with it.  I believe Nagios has a
check_lmsensors plugin available. ;)

	-I

[1] - lm_sensors reports internal temperature, which is usually much
higher than external temperature. So tune your thresholds accordingly...