
Ask HN: Best environmental monitoring front end for large lab, small datacenter? - rckoepke
We have about 3000 physical servers in our R&amp;D lab. We have various environmental sensors (server temps, rack temps, room temp, humidity, HVAC statuses, etc) already accessible behind disparate portals.<p>I&#x27;m moving all these to one frontend. Are there some solutions for this that people here like? I&#x27;d love to be able to share all the dashboards with the rest of my team, send out emails automatically when things break, and also send emails when they appear fixed.<p>Obviously it&#x27;s not too hard to do this from scratch, but figured it might make sense not to reinvent the wheel if there&#x27;s something excellent available.
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wikibob
What’s your budget?

If you want a fancy easy to use UI you can consider getting the data into
something like DataDog. But it’s expensive.

For lower budget, consider Prometheus and Grafana. You will need to write glue
code to get the the data points wired to prometheus.

For a scalable backend consider Grafana cloud, or you can run Cortex or Thanos
yourself.

What resolution do you want? That is how frequently do you want to save a
datapoint?

~~~
rckoepke
Any reason you can think of to store points at a higher resolution than 1
minute?

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PaulWaldman
What systems/protocols are your environmental systems using?

A common monitoring stack is Telegraf/InfluxDB or Prometheus for monitoring
and storage. Grafana for visualization.

~~~
rckoepke
Thank you! These look very well-tailored.

As for systems/protocols, all I know at the moment is that some of it
currently uses Zabbix. It's multi-departmental so fact-finding goes slowly.
I'm an industrial IoT guy at heart, so I'm also eager to determine the current
topology.

I've used some proprietary solutions for things like this in the past (OSIsoft
PI System, no relation to the Open Source Initiative "OSI")...and Sunbird DCIM
looks fantastic. Both are probably a contracting company's dream for earning
huge contracts to configure and maintain, and while I'd love to have the
features Sunbird advertises, it doesn't feel like the right solution during a
cost-cutting year. It also feels like it would be more difficult for the team
to maintain.

In addition, my organization has been willing to let employees use their 9-5
work hours to contribute to open source when bug fixes or new features were
needed for software stacks we depend on. So it feels good to see some well-
developed open source options that we may be able to contribute to down the
road.

~~~
PaulWaldman
Good to hear, I'm an industrial IoT guy as well. I was curious if the
environmental monitors were using ModBus, OPC-UA, or BACNet.

Zabbix can integrate with InfluxDB and I beleive there is currently a Telegraf
Input Plugin for Zabbix under development. Grafana can also be used to query
Zabbix content directly.

I have extensive expierence with the traditional Historians like OSI Pi
Server. You can actually visualize data from OSI Pi in Grafana! The Open
Source and COTS produts have their own specific use cases. Much of it comes
down to will the IT or OT groups be maintaining the system and what kind of
support do they require.

That's great that your organization supports open source!

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xwalterx
[http://www.dglogik.com/iot-verticals/intelligent-
buildings-s...](http://www.dglogik.com/iot-verticals/intelligent-buildings-
software/data-centers)

