The servers are the nerve center of your company. It's important to take care of it.
In today's world, servers are becoming more and more important. Not only in companies purely focused on the IT sector, other firms even those dedicated to production, retail or logistics, increasingly depend on servers and computer equipment for their operation.
The importance becomes so great that this equipment can become a fundamental part of any process. Therefore, not only are the tasks they perform important, but also the devices themselves on which they depend. That is where monitoring comes in.
What technologies are available for server monitoring?
If we talk about monitoring and management of servers Hardware, the first names that come to mind are iDRAC (Integrated Dell Remote Access) and iLO (Integrated Lights-Out), both technologies for maintenance of servers "out-of-band", without dependence on the operating system.
As an initial summary, iDRAC is a proprietary technology of DELL while iLO is part of HP. Both derive from IPMI, the standard created and maintained today by Intel, adding in many cases the possibility of management and integration with the specific hardware of each device.
Why would you use these technologies?
Unlike other monitoring technologies, as we mentioned before, they work independently of the operating system, so they give us many advantages:
- Is not necessary to install anything.
- It is independent of the virtualization you have installed (regardless of the number of virtual machines you never lose the overview of the server)
- Possibility to perform actions on the equipment itself even if the equipment is turned off (Depending on the hardware of the equipment)
A standard that many times is not enough
Typically, proprietary management solutions such as those we see in this text provide greater integration with the hardware and often have better features (monitoring, logging, access) than a generic IPMI implementation.
But more importantly, all of the services mentioned above comply with this standard (or a specific version of it), so you can use specific tools of these technologies or standardized IPMI tools if you do not need the extra features. This can be an advantage in case you need to integrate the infrastructure with some monitoring system that is compatible with the standard and not with the specific vendor solutions.
Differences between iLO and iDRAC
There is not much difference between Dell's iDRAC and HP's iLO since both are developed in a similar way to achieve the same goals, we could say that both brands have the same type of technology with different names.
While it is true that the HP solution may seem easier to use at first glance compared to the DELL solution, both have the same features and functionality. Neither will be a determining factor in choosing the new servers for your company.
Server monitoring
Taking advantage of the possibilities of these protocols and the capabilities of Zabbix for monitoring equipment, our goal is to keep the servers under control with no downtime.
To do this, it is not necessary to make many developments, Zabbix itself already incorporates some tools that will make the task much easier:
- HP server monitoring (iLO)
By default, Zabbix has a specific template for monitoring iLO-compliant servers capable of obtaining basic server data such as serial number, model, whether it is on or off, time, etc. As well as to auto-discover more complete and interesting metrics such as CPU data, fans, memory, disks, etc.