Not to go too off-topic, but if there is a more preferred location for me to
ask, please let me know. I'm looking for recommendations on open source
packages that people are using for monitoring power utilization of their
network/server gear.
We're using Cacti currently, pulling the data from APCs via SNMP, and I
wanted to check if someone had come across a better method before I
reinvented the wheel.
I do the same, but with ganglia. I've noticed that different APCs report power differently (after comparing APC output to BCMS output.) Our newer servers also report power consumption via IPMI: /usr/bin/ipmitool sdr type "Current". We also graph that via ganglia.
-Dave
I'd think SNMP will be what any product uses to query APC gear, even their own suite uses SNMP to collect information and receive traps.
We use cacti to graph our loads on the APC power bars and UPS gear, gives you everything you need on all phases/legs, was there something in particular you were after?
-g
Same. Cacti
-b
Is anyone seeing duplicate packets coming out of Level 3 on the West Coast of the US ?, we are seeing major issues routing across their network with horrible results to our end points with what looks to be duplicate packets and or split routes.
Anyone on the list with level 3 ?? if so please contact me off list ASAP.
BRW
Cacti is a cracking bit of software, but I found this difficult to
integrate and customize to what we required.
I ended up writing our own, custom pollers, Database backend, web frontend
and rrd to generate the graphing.
We were quoted something like £50k for something awfully similar..
Cheers,
Chris
I haven't used cacti in a while, but does it let you combine several RRD files in to one graph? If so that's useful for power stuff, because you're likely to want to graph an aggregate of several things across different devices - for example a+b power of a server, or aggregate power usage for one customer with multiple power feeds.
Note that RRD has some cool stuff that cacti can't use by default, including the "aberrant behavior detection" functionality - that's probably quite useful for power and environmental stuff..
Nathan Ward wrote:
I haven't used cacti in a while, but does it let you combine several RRD files in to one graph? If so that's useful for power stuff, because you're likely to want to graph an aggregate of several things across different devices - for example a+b power of a server, or aggregate power usage for one customer with multiple power feeds.
Yes this is possible, without going into it too deeply since this is nanog, not cacti-users. You create the individual graphs, then create a new graph Graph management-> Add (with host and template set to none) then add data sources from other graphs/hosts. The nice thing about doing it this way is if you already have data being graphed, it will use the history to create the new graph.
We use this with our bandwidth usage graph for our individual providers to show the aggregate bandwidth, and some other internal graphs that have history going back years. And at $oldjob I used it to show rf usage on our towers, quite handy with equipment that automatically changed frequency.
Chris Russell wrote:
I ended up writing our own, custom pollers, Database backend, web frontend
and rrd to generate the graphing.
Shameless plug ... rrdbot does efficient light-weight snmp polling, and
should be very flexible for mixing with other software:
http://memberwebs.com/stef/software/rrdbot/
Cheers,
Stef