Hi,
I was looking for a check plugin for DELL iDRAC and was wondering what is your experience. And which plugin would you recommend?
These guys looking promising (at least for me): (1) and (2)
Official supported by DELL sounds to me like cracking a nut with a sledgehammer.
TIA
Roland
Hi,
I’ve started to monitor DELL server hardware with ESXi via VMware API which works fine.
Some weeks ago I changed to monitoring via Redfish API direct on the iDRAC by using a python based check script from here.Reason for switching was additional storage hardware which was not shown in VMware API.
SNMP was not an option because OID might change and you also have to take care of different hardware versions and generations. The Nagios checks provided by Dell are complicated and not really open for other linux distributions.
The Redfish API delivers comprehensive info about hardware, firmware and health status including alerts triggered by vendor provided thresholds. It also allows to automatically collect inventory data.
It works not only on Dell Hardware, you can also monitor HW of other common vendors which support Redfish.
But be aware that CPU power of iDRAC hardware is limited and so queries can take some time.
To avoide timeouts I had to set Icinga check timeouts up to 30sec. It also seems that some API queries leads to (API) crashes due to bugs in iDRAC firmware - but it’s running stable with latest firmware (iDRAC8: 2.81+, iDRAC9: 5.0+), but this may also depend on your hardware configuration.
The check script currently includes a workaround by skipping to query specific DELL RAID infos which could trigger a crash (iDRAC unresponsible for some minutes) - you have to check that all relvant HW info is delivered.
Cheers,
Manfred