Table of Contents
4 IPMI checks
Overview
You can monitor the health and availability of Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) devices in Zabbix.
To perform IPMI checks Zabbix server must be initially configured with IPMI support.
IPMI is a standardized interface for remote "lights-out" or "out-of-band" management of computer systems. It allows to monitor hardware status directly from the so-called "out-of-band" management cards, independently from the operating system or whether the machine is powered on at all.
Zabbix IPMI monitoring works only for devices having IPMI support (HP iLO, DELL DRAC, IBM RSA, Sun SSP, etc).
See also known issues for IPMI checks.
Configuration
Host configuration
A host must be configured to process IPMI checks. An IPMI interface must be added, with the respective IP and port numbers, and IPMI authentication parameters must be defined.
See the configuration of hosts for more details.
Server configuration
By default, the Zabbix server is not configured to start any IPMI pollers, thus any added IPMI items won't work. To change this, open the Zabbix server configuration file (zabbix_server.conf) as root and look for the following line:
Uncomment it and set poller count to, say, 3, so that it reads:
Save the file and restart zabbix_server afterwards.
Item configuration
When configuring an item on a host level:
- For Host interface select the IPMI IP and port
- Select 'IPMI agent' as the Type
- Specify the IPMI sensor (for example 'FAN MOD 1A RPM' on Dell Poweredge)
- Enter an item key that is unique within the host (say, ipmi.fan.rpm)
- Select the respective type of information ('Numeric (float)' in this case), units (most likely 'rpm') and any other required item attributes
Timeout and session termination
IPMI message timeouts and retry counts are defined in OpenIPMI library. Due to the current design of OpenIPMI, it is not possible to make these values configurable in Zabbix, neither on interface nor item level.
IPMI session inactivity timeout for LAN is 60 +/-3 seconds. Currently it is not possible to implement periodic sending of Activate Session command with OpenIPMI. If there are no IPMI item checks from Zabbix to a particular BMC for more than the session timeout configured in BMC then the next IPMI check after the timeout expires will time out due to individual message timeouts, retries or receive error. After that a new session is opened and a full rescan of the BMC is initiated. If you want to avoid unnecessary rescans of the BMC it is advised to set the IPMI item polling interval below the IPMI session inactivity timeout configured in BMC.