netdata/collectors/freeipmi.plugin

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