Collecting IPMI device sensor metrics

In addition to the set of metrics that are automatically collected by the monitoring agent, you might want to collect other metrics such as sensor metrics. You can use the Prometheus IPMI Exporter to perform the collection of Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) device sensor metrics.

The Prometheus IPMI Exporter exporter supports local IPMI devices and remote devices that can be accessed by using Remote Management Control Protocol (RMCP).
When you use RMCP to access remote devices, you can use an IPMI exporter to monitor multiple IPMI devices. You identify each device by passing the target hostname as a parameter.
The IPMI exporter relies on tools from the FreeIPMI suite.

The following figures shows different configurations that you can use to monitor sensor metrics from hosts that can be available in IBM Cloud or outside the IBM Cloud:

Figure 1. IPMI components: IPMI exporter and Kubernetes agent in different hosts

You can collect the following metrics when you configure the IPMI exporter in a server:

IPMI admin metrics

The metric ipmi_up {collector="<NAME>"} reports 1 when data from a remote host is collected successfully. It reports 0 for collection of data in a local host.

The metric ipmi_scrape_duration_seconds reports the amount of time that it takes the collector to retrieve the data.
IPMI System event log (SEL) metrics

The metric ipmi_sel_entries_count reports the number of entries in the system event log.

The metric ipmi_sel_free_space_bytes reports the number of free bytes for new ystem event log entries.
IPMI sensor data

The IPMI exporter collects 2 metrics per sensor type: state and value. A value of 0 reports a normal state. A value of 1 reports a warning state. A value of 2 reports a critical state. A value of NaN reports information not available. For example, see the metrics for different sensors:

Temperature sensor metrics: ipmi_temperature_celsius, ipmi_temperature_state

Fan speed sensor metrics: ipmi_fan_speed_rpm, ipmi_fan_speed_state

Voltage sensor metrics: ipmi_voltage_state, ipmi_voltage_volts
IPMI chassis power state of the machine

The metric ipmi_chassis_power_state informs about the current state of the chassis of the machine. It has a value of 1 when the power is on. It has a value of 0 when the power is off.
DCMI data

The metric ipmi_dcmi_power_consumption_current_watts informs about the live power consumption of the machine in Watts.
BMC details

The metric ipmi_bmc_info includes information about the firmware revision and manufacturer in labels and has a value of 1.

For more information, see Prometheus IPMI Exporter.

Complete the following steps to configure a monitoring agent to collect IPMI metrics from 1 or more hosts:

Configure a monitoring agent

To monitor 1 or more hosts, you must configure a monitoring agent. The agent collects automatically a set of metrics that you can monitor through the monitoring UI.

See Install a monitoring agent to collect and forward metrics from a server to an IBM Cloud Monitoring instance and choose the monitoring agent that you want to configure to monitor a host.

Configuring the Prometheus IPMI Exporter

You can install the IPMI exporer in 1 or more hosts to collect IPMI metrics.

For each host that you want to collect IPMI metrics, complete the following steps to install the IPMI exporter. For example, complete the following steps for a Linux-based host:

From a local terminal,download the Prometheus IPMI exporter.
In the server, from the ssh session, create the directory /usr/sysdig. Run the following commands:
```
cd /usr
```
```
mkdir sysdig
```
Copy the file to the server. From the directory where the file is available, run the following command:
```
scp ipmi_exporter-v1.2.0.linux-amd64.tar.gz  root@<IP_ADDRESS>:/usr/sysdig/
```
Where <IP_ADDRESS> is the public IP address of the server.

If the command fails, check that your VPN connection is still open.

Uncompress the file. Run the following commands:

cd /usr/sysdig/

tar -xvf ipmi_exporter-v1.2.0.linux-amd64.tar.gz

Install the FreeIPMI suite. Run the following commands:
```
sudo apt-get update
```
```
sudo apt-get install freeipmi
```

Configure the ipmi_local.yml file.

You can update the file to exclude sensors that you do not want to monitor.

Change to the directory where you have extracted the IPMI exporter:

cd ipmi_exporter-v1.2.0.linux-amd64/

Check the configuration file. Run the command: more ipmi_local.yml You should see a file with similar content.

# Configuration file for ipmi_exporter

# This is an example config for scraping the local host.
# In most cases, this should work without using a config file at all.
modules:
        default:
                # Available collectors are bmc, ipmi, chassis, dcmi, and sel
                collectors:
                - bmc
                - ipmi
                - dcmi
                - chassis
                - sel
                # Got any sensors you don't care about? Add them here.
                exclude_sensor_ids:
                # - 2

If the IPMI exporter is installed in a host from which you plan to collect sensor metrics from multiple hosts, configure the ipmi_remote.yml file. SeeIPMI remote sample file.

Run the IPMI exporter.

./ipmi_exporter --config.file=ipmi_local.yml &

Check the IPMI exporter is running. Run the command:
```
ps -aux | grep ipmi
```
You should see the IPMI exporter running.

Configure network settings

If you want to collect IPMI metrics from remote servers, complete the following steps:

Enable the firewall to allow access to the ipmi_exporter.
[Optional] Update the VPC rules

If you use private endpoints, add an inbound rule to the security group for port 9290 with source type = Security Group and choose the security group for the server.

Update the monitoring agent to collect IPMI metrics

You must configure the monitoring agent to enable collection of IPMI metrics.

Choose one of the following options based on the type of monitoring agent that you configured:

Kubernetes monitoring agent

Run the following command to edit the configmap and add information about the hosts where the IPMI exporter is configured:

kubectl edit configmap sysdig-agent -n ibm-observe

Modify the yaml file to add the prometheus configuration of the IPMI exporter:

log:
  file_priority: error
configmap: true
### Agent tags
# tags: linux:ubuntu,dept:dev,local:nyc

#### Software related config ####

# Collector address
# collector: 192.168.1.1

# Collector TCP port
# collector_port: 6666

# Whether collector accepts ssl
# ssl: true

# collector certificate validation
# ssl_verify_certificate: true

#######################################
# new_k8s: true
# k8s_cluster_name: production
security:
  k8s_audit_server_url: 0.0.0.0
  k8s_audit_server_port: 7765
k8s_cluster_name: <CLUSTER_NAME>/<CLUSTER_ID>
tags: ibm.containers-kubernetes.cluster.id:<CLUSTER_ID>
collector: <INGESTION_ENDPOINT>
collector_port: 6443
ssl: true
ssl_verify_certificate: true
sysdig_capture_enabled: false
promscrape_fastproto: true
use_promscrape: true
prom_service_discovery: true
prometheus:
  enabled: true
  log_errors: true
  max_metrics: 200000
  max_metrics_per_process: 200000
  max_tags_per_metric: 100
  ingest_raw: true
  ingest_calculated: false
prometheus.yaml:
----
global:
  scrape_interval: 10s
scrape_configs:
- job_name: ipmi
  metrics_path: /metrics
  static_configs:
  - targets:
    - '<IP_ADDRESS_OF_REMOTE_SERVER_WHERE_IPMI_EXPORTER_IS_RUNNING>:9290'
    - '<IP_ADDRESS_OF_REMOTE_SERVER_WHERE_IPMI_EXPORTER_IS_RUNNING>:9290'
    - '<IP_ADDRESS_OF_REMOTE_SERVER_WHERE_IPMI_EXPORTER_IS_RUNNING>:9290'

Where

<IP_ADDRESS_OF_REMOTE_SERVER> is the IP address of a server that you want to monitor.
<INGESTION_ENDPOINT> is the IBM Cloud Monitoring instance ingestion endpoint, for example, ingest.us-south.monitoring.cloud.ibm.com. See Collector endpoints.
<IP_ADDRESS_OF_REMOTE_SERVER>:9290 is the IP address of the server that you want to monitor.

When you save the file, changes are applied.

Linux service monitoring agent

Complete the following steps to update the monitoring agent to collect IPMI metrics:

SSH into the host where the monitoring agent is running. Then, change to the directory /opt/draios/etc/ and run the following command:
```
cd /opt/draios/etc/
```

Update the /opt/draios/etc/dragent.yaml to enable remote scraping.

Append the following section to the dragent.yaml file:

customerid: xxxxxxxxxx
collector: ingest.us-south.monitoring.cloud.ibm.com
collector_port: 6443
ssl: true
sysdig_capture_enabled: false
use_promscrape: true
promscrape_fastproto: false
prom_service_discovery: true
prometheus:
  enabled: true
  process_filter:
    - include:
        port: 9290
        conf:
          port: 9290
          path: "/metrics"

Restart the monitoring agent. Run the following command:
```
service dragent restart
```

Check that you are getting IPMI metrics

Launch the monitoring UI.
Create a dashboard.
Add a panel for each of the following queries:

Table 1. IPMI exporter sample queries
Metric	PromQL Query	Options
Ipmi Up	`ipmi_up`	`number (auto)`
Voltage	`ipmi_voltage_volts`	`number (auto)`
Temperature Celsius	`ipmi_temperature_celsius`	`number (auto)`
Fan speed RPM	`ipmi_fan_speed_rpm`	`number (auto)`

For example, you can create a dashboard that looks as follows: