Monitoring of Dell servers with iDRAC

Dell Remote Access Controller, as the monitoring and management solution on Dell devices, contains a lot of useful information describing the performance and health state of server appliances. Check out following article to find out how to configure out the monitoring of iDRAC platform with the usage of DELL iDRAC IPMI sensor.

Dell’s iDRAC description and main features

The Remote Access Controller for Dell devices, better known as iDRAC/DRAC can be considered as an out-of-band platform to provide for administrators tools which allows them the manage the hardware equipment’s configuration and monitor the behavior of the environment installed in Dell servers, depending on the way of how the platform is integrated with the server (as an expansion card or as an integrated chip in the server’s motherboard). This is also the way of how we can describe with which solution we are working on a specific device, as the expansion card solution is often called an iDRAC platform.

With that monitoring platform, admins can configure and monitor key features like power management, hardware performance, and efficiency of cooling solutions in monitored server.

DELL iDRAC IPMI Sensor

In the recent release of the NetCrunch users received the possibility to assign to monitored node the DELL iDRAC IPMI sensor. This monitoring sensor performs the monitoring of the iDRAC appliances on devices, which does not require any additional configuration related to selecting the appropriate entries manually to provide metrics by the IPMI interface.

It extends the monitoring of other monitoring sensors (Basic IPMI) with information about the performance of the installed drives and memory. The only thing, which administrators should provide is to provide the accurate credentials for IPMI connection.

Metrics and alerts configured by default

After setting up the Dell iDRAC IPMI monitoring sensor NetCrunch is ready-to-go with the collecting the data about essential metrics related to the power supply, temperature and the speed of the fans installed in server:

• Dell iDRAC IPMI.Fan\Value [RPM]
• Dell iDRAC IPMI.Temperature\Value [degrees C]
• Dell iDRAC IPMI.Voltage\Value [Volts]

Also by default there are configured alerts for the following events:

• Request Timeout Error
• Authentication Error
• Fan status has changed from OK state
• Temperature status has changed from OK state
• Power Supply status has changed from OK state
• Voltage status has changed from OK state

Extending the functionality of the sensor

Beyond the default configuration of the iDRAC sensor, NetCrunch monitors the selected counters and states for each of installed devices and available sensors (i.e.: temperature or voltage) in Dell server:

• Fan
• Temperature
• Voltage
• Memory
• Physical Security
• Drive Slot
• Critical Interrupt
• Power Supply

For each of these variables in the monitoring sensor, we can configure additional alerts for unexpected or undesired behaviors of these parts of server architecture. With that, we can specify the detailed alerting about the state of devices and automate the way of how the NetCrunch will react to these events by configuring suitable alerting scripts to handle these unwanted cases.

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