pnw-ryanmcgr / ipmi_exporter

Remote IPMI exporter for Prometheus

Prometheus IPMI Exporter

This is an IPMI exporter for Prometheus.

It supports both the regular /metrics endpoint, exposing metrics from the host that the exporter is running on, as well as an /ipmi endpoint that supports IPMI over RMCP - one exporter running on one host can be used to monitor a large number of IPMI interfaces by passing the target parameter to a scrape.

The exporter relies on tools from the FreeIPMI suite for the actual IPMI implementation.

Installation

For most use-cases, simply download the the latest release.

Building from source

You need a Go development environment. Then, simply run make to build the executable:

make

This uses the common prometheus tooling to build and run some tests.

Alternatively, you can use the standard Go tooling, which will install the executable in $GOPATH/bin:

go get github.com/prometheus-community/ipmi_exporter

Building a Docker container

You can build a Docker container with the included docker make target:

make promu
promu crossbuild -p linux/amd64 -p linux/arm64
make docker

This will not even require Go tooling on the host. See the included docker compose example for how to use the resulting container.

Building a RPM Package

See how to build a RPM package.

Running

A minimal invocation looks like this:

./ipmi_exporter

Supported parameters include:

• web.listen-address: the address/port to listen on (default: ":9290")
• config.file: path to the configuration file (default: none)
• freeipmi.path: path to the FreeIPMI executables (default: rely on $PATH)

For syntax and a complete list of available parameters, run:

./ipmi_exporter -h

Make sure you have the following tools from the FreeIPMI suite installed:

• ipmimonitoring/ipmi-sensors
• ipmi-dcmi
• ipmi-raw
• bmc-info
• ipmi-sel
• ipmi-chassis

Running as unprivileged user

If you are running the exporter as unprivileged user, but need to execute the FreeIPMI tools as root, you can do the following:

1. Add sudoers files to permit the following commands

   ipmi-exporter ALL = NOPASSWD: /usr/sbin/ipmimonitoring,\
                                 /usr/sbin/ipmi-sensors,\
                                 /usr/sbin/ipmi-dcmi,\
                                 /usr/sbin/ipmi-raw,\
                                 /usr/sbin/bmc-info,\
                                 /usr/sbin/ipmi-chassis,\
                                 /usr/sbin/ipmi-sel
   

2. In your module config, override the collector command with sudo for every collector you are using and add the actual command as custom argument. Example for the "ipmi" collector:

   collector_cmd:
     ipmi: sudo
   custom_args:
     ipmi:
     - "ipmimonitoring"

   See the last module in the example config.

Running in Docker

NOTE: you should only use Docker for remote metrics.

See Building a Docker container and the example docker-compose.yml. Edit the ipmi_remote.yml file to configure IPMI credentials, then run with:

sudo docker-compose up -d

By default, the server will bind on 0.0.0.0:9290.

Configuration

The configuration document describes both the configuration of the IPMI exporter itself as well as providing some guidance for configuring the Prometheus server to scrape it.

TLS and basic authentication

The IPMI Exporter supports TLS and basic authentication.

To use TLS and/or basic authentication, you need to pass a configuration file using the --web.config.file parameter. The format of the file is described in the exporter-toolkit repository.

Exported data

For a description of the metrics that this exporter provides, see the metrics document.