Monitor Your Server's Sensor Values in Real Time

Suppose you have a server that is having some heat issues or perhaps other problems that are related to its onboard sensors. If that server has a BMC (Base Management Controller), you can monitor its sensor values from any machine on its subnet in real time using sensor.exe included with Deployment Solution for Dell Servers.

I will use the example of monitoring the fan speed on a given server. First, I open a command prompt and browse to my Dell Directory (usually C:\Program Files\Altiris\eXpress\Deployment Server\Dell)

I then go into atools\power\ipmiutil

Inside that folder is a utility called sensor.exe. Using the following command I can print out all sensor values:

sensor -U root -P calvin -N 192.168.2.24

I then get a long printout of each sensor. I look through the list and locate the one I'm interested in:

0019 SDR Full 01 34 20 a 04 snum 33 FAN 4 RPM     = 4e OK* 5850.00 RPM

I can then take the first value (0019) and pass it in with the -i argument as follows:

sensor -L 3600 -U root -P calvin -N 192.168.2.24 -i 0019

Note: The "-L 3600" tells sensor.exe to loop N amount of times (one second for every loop). This means that this sensor will be monitored every second for one hour.

And that's it! I can now do a stress test of the server to see if the fan speed increases according to how much load I put on it.

I could also embed this command in a server side script and have it run on any given server, and log all results.