freeipmi.plugin

Netdata has a freeipmi plugin.

FreeIPMI provides in-band and out-of-band IPMI software based on the IPMI v1.5/2.0 specification. The IPMI specification defines a set of interfaces for platform management and is implemented by a number vendors for system management. The features of IPMI that most users will be interested in are sensor monitoring, system event monitoring, power control, and serial-over-LAN (SOL).

Compile freeipmi.plugin

1. install libipmimonitoring-dev or libipmimonitoring-devel (freeipmi-devel on RHEL based OS) using the package manager of your system.

2. re-install Netdata from source. The installer will detect that the required libraries are now available and will also build freeipmi.plugin.

❗ In some distributions libipmimonitoring.pc is located in an unregistered directory. In that case you should find the file and link it to the standard pkg-config directory. Usually, running sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/pkgconfig/libipmimonitoring.pc/libipmimonitoring.pc /usr/lib/pkgconfig/libipmimonitoring.pc resolves the issue.

Keep in mind IPMI requires root access, so the plugin is setuid to root.

If you just installed the required IPMI tools, please run at least once the command ipmimonitoring and verify it returns sensors information. This command initialises IPMI configuration, so that the Netdata plugin will be able to work.

Netdata use

The plugin creates (up to) 8 charts, based on the information collected from IPMI:

1. number of sensors by state
2. number of events in SEL
3. Temperatures CELSIUS
4. Temperatures FAHRENHEIT
5. Voltages
6. Currents
7. Power
8. Fans

It also adds 2 alarms:

1. Sensors in non-nominal state (i.e. warning and critical)
2. SEL is non empty

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.

freeipmi.plugin configuration

The plugin supports a few options. To see them, run:

# /usr/libexec/netdata/plugins.d/freeipmi.plugin -h

netdata freeipmi.plugin 1.8.0-546-g72ce5d6b_rolling

Copyright (C) 2016-2017 Costa Tsaousis <costa@tsaousis.gr>

Released under GNU General Public License v3 or later.

All rights reserved.

This program is a data collector plugin for netdata.

Available command line options:

SECONDS data collection frequency

minimum: 5

debug enable verbose output

default: disabled

sel

no-sel enable/disable SEL collection

default: enabled

hostname HOST

username USER

password PASS connect to remote IPMI host

default: local IPMI processor

noauthcodecheck don't check the authentication codes returned

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.

sdr-cache-dir PATH directory for SDR cache files

default: /tmp

sensor-config-file FILE filename to read sensor configuration

default: system default

ignore N1,N2,N3,... sensor IDs to ignore

default: none

-v

-V

version print version and exit

Linux kernel module for IPMI is CPU hungry.

On Linux run this to lower kipmiN CPU utilization:

# echo 10 > /sys/module/ipmi_si/parameters/kipmid_max_busy_us

or create: /etc/modprobe.d/ipmi.conf with these contents:

options ipmi_si kipmid_max_busy_us=10

For more information:

https://github.com/netdata/netdata/tree/master/collectors/freeipmi.plugin

You can set these options in /etc/netdata/netdata.conf at this section:

[plugin:freeipmi]

update every = 5

command options =

Append to command options = the settings you need. 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.

Ignoring 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).

So, freeipmi.plugin supports the option ignore that accepts a comma separated list of sensor IDs to ignore. To configure it, edit /etc/netdata/netdata.conf and set:

[plugin:freeipmi]

command options = ignore 1,2,3,4,...

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'

...

Debugging

You can run the plugin by hand:

# become user netdata

sudo su -s /bin/sh netdata

# run the plugin in debug mode

/usr/libexec/netdata/plugins.d/freeipmi.plugin 5 debug

You will get verbose output on what the plugin does.

kipmi0 CPU usage

There have been reports that kipmi is showing increased CPU when the IPMI is queried. To lower the CPU consumption of the system you can issue this command:

echo 10 > /sys/module/ipmi_si/parameters/kipmid_max_busy_us

You can also permanently set the above setting by creating the file /etc/modprobe.d/ipmi.conf with this content:

# prevent kipmi from consuming 100% CPU

options ipmi_si kipmid_max_busy_us=10

This instructs the kernel IPMI module to pause for a tick between checking IPMI. Querying IPMI will be a lot slower now (e.g. several seconds for IPMI to respond), but kipmi will not use any noticeable CPU. You can also use a higher number (this is the number of microseconds to poll IPMI for a response, before waiting for a tick).

If you need to disable IPMI for Netdata, edit /etc/netdata/netdata.conf and set:

[plugins]

freeipmi = no