README.md 11 KB
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).
Installing the 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.
Special Considerations
Accessing IPMI requires root access, so the FreeIPMI plugin is automatically installed setuid root.
FreeIPMI does not work correctly on IBM POWER systems, thus Netdata’s FreeIPMI plugin is not usable on such systems.
If you have not previously used IPMI on your system, you will probably need to run the ipmimonitoring command as root
to initiailze IPMI settings so that the Netdata plugin works correctly. It should return information about available
seensors on the system.
In some distributions libipmimonitoring.pc is located in a non-standard directory, which
can cause building the plugin to fail when building Netdata from source. In that case you
should find the file and link it to the standard pkg-config directory. Usually, running sudo ln -s
/usr/lib/$(uname -m)-linux-gnu/pkgconfig/libipmimonitoring.pc/libipmimonitoring.pc /usr/lib/pkgconfig/libipmimonitoring.pc
resolves this issue.
Metrics
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.
Metrics grouped by scope.
The scope defines the instance that the metric belongs to. An instance is uniquely identified by a set of labels.
global
These metrics refer to the monitored host.
This scope has no labels.
Metrics:
| Metric | Dimensions | Unit |
|---|---|---|
| ipmi.sel | events | events |
sensor
These metrics refer to the sensor.
Labels:
| Label | Description |
|---|---|
| sensor | Sensor name. Same value as the "Name" column in the ipmi-sensors output. |
| type | Sensor type. Same value as the "Type" column in the ipmi-sensors output. |
| component | General sensor component. Identified by Netdata based on sensor name and type (e.g. System, Processor, Memory). |
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 | % |
Alarms
There are 2 alarms:
- The sensor is in a warning or critical state.
- System Event Log (SEL) is non-empty.
Configuration
The plugin supports a few options. To see them, run:
# ./freeipmi.plugin --help
netdata freeipmi.plugin v1.40.0-137-gf162c25bd
Copyright (C) 2023 Netdata Inc.
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
reread-sdr-cache re-read SDR cache on every iteration
default: disabled
interpret-oem-data attempt to parse OEM data
default: disabled
assume-system-event-record
tread illegal SEL events records as normal
default: disabled
ignore-non-interpretable-sensors
do not read sensors that cannot be interpreted
default: disabled
bridge-sensors bridge sensors not owned by the BMC
default: disabled
shared-sensors enable shared sensors, if found
default: disabled
no-discrete-reading do not read sensors that their event/reading type code is invalid
default: enabled
ignore-scanning-disabled
Ignore the scanning bit and read sensors no matter what
default: disabled
assume-bmc-owner assume the BMC is the sensor owner no matter what
(usually bridging is required too)
default: disabled
hostname HOST
username USER
password PASS connect to remote IPMI host
default: local IPMI processor
no-auth-code-check
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
sel-config-file FILE filename to read sel configuration
default: system default
ignore N1,N2,N3,... sensor IDs to ignore
default: none
ignore-status N1,N2,N3,... sensor IDs to ignore status (nominal/warning/critical)
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