IPMI Monitoring via Telegraf

Telegraf supports IPMI inputs for monitoring via ipmitool. Now this will only work if your server supports the Intelligent Platform Management Interface aka IPMI. To check if your server supports it you can either look up your server’s documentation or take a look at the UEFI/BIOS for IPMI settings. Usually you have to enable it as it’s not enabled by default.

Getting started

Note: If you followed my guide, Grafana – Start from Scratch, you should already have IPMItool installed with Telegraf in Docker! If so you can skip right to the configuration section!

First you will need to download and install the ipmitool. I am running this on a 2c 2GB Ubuntu server 17.10 VM along with a Telegraf install with [[inputs.ipmi_sensor]] enabled.

Installing IPMItool

sudo apt-get install ipmitool -y

To check and see if it installed correctly you can run ipmitool -H IP.OF.SERVER.HERE -U username -P password sensor

Configuring the IPMI Input

Install Telegraf and edit the telegraf.conf file.

nano /etc/telegraf/telegraf.d/ipmi-input.conf

Paste the following into the new file and edit the servers and metric_version sections to match your setup.

Note, you can have multiple IPMI inputs, just copy everything and paste it a second time and for how many servers you want to monitor.

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[[inputs.ipmi_sensor]]
2
  path = "/usr/bin/ipmitool" # This is the default install location of ipmitool
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  servers = ["USERNAME:PASSWORD@lan(IP.OF.IPMI.SERVER)"]
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  interval = "30s"
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  timeout = "20s"
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  metric_version = "SUPPORTED METRIC VERSION OF SERVER" # Usually 1 or 2

Save and close ipmi-input.conf and start telegraf.

sudo systemctl start telegraf.service

Adding IPMI to Grafana

Now I am going to assume you already have Telegraf reporting to Influxdb with a Influxdb Telegraf data source already added to Grafana. If not go check out the Telegraf install guide(s).

Add a single stat panel to your dashboard with the following info under Metrics:

FROM default ipmi_sensor WHERE server = IP.OF.IPMI.SERVER AND name = cpu1_temp SELECT field(value) mean() GROUP BY time(30s) full(null)

Under options set Unit to Temperature > Celsius (°C)

You should now have a singlestat panel that displays current cpu temp every 30s. You can speed up the polling rate by editing the interval = "30s" value in telegraf.conf and changing time(30s) to the same value.