Hi SwiNOGers !
We're looking here in my company to do some extra environmental monitoring. We're mainly looking for some temperature, air flow and AC
voltage monitoring.
We don't really want to invest in expensive solutions like APC's one, or
Rittal. The sensorProbe products (from either AKCP or BlackBox) are quite interesting.
And you, what do you have in your datacenters ? Any hints to some other
good products ?
Have a nice day!
-olivier
Oliver,
For temperature it all depends on how many positions you wish to monitor, perhaps the cheapest (In terms of time plus cost) is solution which is offered by Distrelec, look it up on their site, it has article number 866230. For about 420.- CHF you will get a little box capable with 4 sensors which are accesable via SNMP.
If you need more than that, you will ether need a serious appliance or do it yourself. If you decide to DIY, RS232 is your friend.
With solutions like this: http://www.phanderson.com/ you could monitor almost unlimited number of temperature and humidity positions but BE CAREFUL with the bus length, we have run into some serious issues near high powered cables.
You can also easily monitor any kind of relays based sensors just by connecting the RX and TX of RS232 to relays ends and periodically checking port for echos, this way stuff like reading out smoke detectors with relays modules or "water sensor" (2 naked cables separated by paper) are peanuts to do.
It is also possible to check for airflow this way, you could construct the little relays which bends over and connects while airflow is present and opens up when it is not. This needs a space with STRONG airflow to be consistent though.
A/C voltage is an interesting one, I was looking for a while for some kind of "energy meter" which would allow readout of info via RS232, so we could measure real power consumption vs load ratio but I could not find any. Easiest way to do this stuff is to read out UPS ratios, most "smart" UPSes support that in one or another way.
You can read all info and present it via SNMP for later analysis, we use net-snmp with embeded perl, I can send you sample of our module if you wish, it is fairly simple.
I would be very interested by ideas regarding detailed airflow readout, it was always interesting me but I could not find any easy solution, only those big "weather stations" which I could not install into any of out airpipes.
Cheers
Thanks all for your inputs.
We're rather looking for some kind of "blackbox" where you just have to plug the sensors, and you can poll the datas over snmp.
We don't really have time for the DIY stuff :)
I think I'll go with the AKCP solution, seems to be the best solution with the widest range of sensors, which are extensible up to 300m.
@Kirill
With AKCP products, you have an AC sensor wich monitor the AC voltage. Our idea is to check if a power line fails. We already have alarms if our PSU fails, but you can't tell if it's a PSU failure, or the whole power line which is down.
Actually, there's a sad story :
Last year, while I was a student here, I made a thermal monitoring sensor on an embedded micro-processor. It worked like a charm (with snmp integration and all the stuff). Unfortunately it's not yet 100% working (especially on the hardware side). And the professor who was in charge of this project don't want to bring it back to life at the moment.
We went through big troubles last week because of a critical failure of our air conditioning installation and we don't want to wait 6 month to have some monitoring up and running ;-)
I would love to do it myself, but I just don't have the time for it.
Marc SCHAEFER a écrit :
On Wed, Apr 02, 2008 at 10:02:46AM +0200, Olivier Beytrison wrote:
We don't really have time for the DIY stuff :)
Ask a student:
Network & Security Engineer, HES-SO Fribourg
:-> _______________________________________________ swinog mailing list swinog@lists.swinog.ch http://lists.swinog.ch/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/swinog
Thanks all for your inputs.
We're rather looking for some kind of "blackbox" where you just have to plug the sensors, and you can poll the datas over snmp.
We don't really have time for the DIY stuff :)
I think I'll go with the AKCP solution, seems to be the best solution with the widest range of sensors, which are extensible up to 300m.
Looks like a good solution.
@Kirill
With AKCP products, you have an AC sensor wich monitor the AC voltage. Our idea is to check if a power line fails. We already have alarms if our PSU fails, but you can't tell if it's a PSU failure, or the whole power line which is down.
Not entirely what I was looking for, most UPSes support readout of the line state nowdays, so detecting power failure is easy, what we where looking for is a "Energy Counter" at the feed into data center, so we could read out our consumption in kW/h automatically.
Cheers
-
Kirill Ponazdyr -
Olivier Beytrison -
schaefer＠alphanet.ch