Server room temp monitoring system?

MrGuvernment

MrGuvernment

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Aug 3, 2004
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We have had some power issues lately in our building that have tripped the AC systems (working on fixing), and are looking at some temp monitoring systems since it kicks out and our server room became an oven one day.

Any experience from anyone on good systems? We got some local quotes around $600-$1000 but they seem to be pretty basic.

i came across these

http://www.itwatchdogs.com/product-detail-microgoose-9.html

but really dont know if they are any good?
 
Moved this over to Networking & Security.

Hopefully the guys here can help you better than General Hardware.
 
Thanks Danny!

Ya, their products from the reading seem to get decent reviews, as well as the AVtech stuff

APC does seem to be on the high end for price.
 
What are you using for power backup? Most APC units have addons to their power backups to do such monitoring.
 
A jiffy pop on top of the server rack will get someone's attention if things get too hot in there.
 
fluke420 said:
The cheap route, Nagios with a USB temp probe.
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disagree, capex is lower but opex will be 10 fold more with a computer + usb probe. Idd stick with the more expensive extremely lower power solution :)
 
xphil3 said:
disagree, capex is lower but opex will be 10 fold more with a computer + usb probe. Idd stick with the more expensive extremely lower power solution :)
Click to expand...

I think that he's suggesting adding a USB thermometer to a pre-existing, physical Nagios box.
 
AceXsmurF said:
What are you using for power backup? Most APC units have addons to their power backups to do such monitoring.
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we do have a UPS system for all of our servers and workstation, we have 2 ceiling hung AC units (this is a small server room, 5 racks) the 1 AC is connected into the USP, but in Costa rica, the way power is, or a storm hits, power often goes out, then kicks in, then out, and it is tripping the actual breaker of the condenser units on the roof. It has only happened twice, but once on a Sunday and i got in Monday morning and the room most of been 60C - good thing most of our servers are new and thermal protection did kick in on 2 of them, the others i have custom built and they have good cooling.

Red Squirrel said:
A jiffy pop on top of the server rack will get someone's attention if things get too hot in there.
Click to expand...

cheap and easy! and i get a snack now and then,

My office is in the server room, so i am around mon-fri all day and often night, it seems to be at night or weekend this happens, so originally we were thinking just a screen and an alarm to alert our support staff if the temp gets too high, but i am thinking why not something that just notifies me directly via email/sms or text or something, a visual / audible alarm would be ideal as well to let the people in the office know.

leaning towards the goose line or the AV's so far.
 
Actually this may be silly but for something very cheap, maybe a web cam pointing to a thermometer. This wont give you any alerting though but it's a quick and easy short term solution until you decide on something better.
 
we ordered the AVTech system - TemPageR 3ER

we were thinking of an audible alarm but since we have people on the phones for customer service, we didnt want to disturb them, also we will have some screen in our CS area (on 24/7) which will display some info, also since that system does email and other ways to inform someone it should work out well.

Will let you know how it goes.
 
We've used the $200ish weathegoose. Works great. Cheapish, and easy to set and forget. We used one in each server room and it works fine. Our apc backups Also have temp monitors USB temp probe is a fun project...
 
use a temp prob and nagios will read it and these is your sensor.

what i was doing was remote controlling into my desktop if i had a power outage at home and turned on CoreTemp and could tell from my CPU temp if the AC was off or not :) (my office is the server room)
 
We use a sensorProbe2 from AKCP ($250 MSRP for base unit, think we paid closer to $200) and my NetAdmin loves it:

http://www.akcp.com/products/base-units/sensorProbe-Series/sensorProbe2/

Our datacenter is only a little larger than 400sqft with a central 6 rack rack (i.e. six 42 up racks together in one big rack) so the one sensorProbe2 get's the job done fine. We use SNMP to feed into our What's Up to alert us but the unit can also do email on it's own. We have a temp probe and an airflow probe but they have tons of different probes. IIRC, we are using another one to monitor our 2 250kw Kohler generators in some manner.

I know we went through a couple of bad choices before settling on this but I don't remember what the bad ones were. Here's pic:

temp.jpg
 
MrGuvernment said:
use a temp prob and nagios will read it and these is your sensor.
Click to expand...

Specifically I was looking for device recommendations.

I finally got this $10 unit "TEMPer" Turns out there are many different versions. The one I recieved is recognized as "TEMPer V1.2" and I found some software that will work with CentOS 5, but it seems on newer distributions it doesn't work (something about a newer libusb is my guess.)

Now I can monitor it through nagios (not really ideal, since it doesn't log exact values unless the state has changed) and also setup an mrtg graph.

For optimal placement, I carefully draped the USB cable in a fashion where the sensor is a few inches from the front of the servers i.e. right before the server sucks in the air.

temperaturegraph.png


Now what to do about small server rooms in office buildings where the A/C gets shut off overnight and over the weekends?
 
We use Temperature@lert probes in our servers hooked up to a server in the rack. They email us with the alerts and since we all have Blackberries, we get the alerts immediately.
 
I am using Openmanage in our Dell R710 servers to monitor temps. I have set it up to e-mail and text me when the temp in the server room gets over 80F. At that point, I know something is up.
 
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