Common interface for sensors/health monitoring

[Aurélien Méré]

Hi,

I've been using FreeBSD for years in all my servers, but I'm facing a big 
problem today. All servers are under monitoring using a couple of 
applications and scripts. Monitored items for each server especially are 
CPU/mobo/UPS/HDD temperatures, CPU load, memory use, fans speed, PSU/UPS 
voltages, HDD/RAID status&usage, network connectivity, UPS load, battery 
status & runtime, ...

My concern today, excepted that there is no way to gather all the data 
through a unique interface and that consequently we have to change the 
scripts depending on hardware, is that some information are no longer 
available at all, especially concerning the MB IC, ie. temperatures, 
voltages & fan speed. Actually, some SMBus controllers (like from 2006 or 
so) are not supported by any driver and I didn't find any port updated to 
access the IC directly (if even possible). Currently, I sometimes have to 
use mbmon with direct I/O, sometimes mbmon with SMBus, sometimes healthd and 
sometimes nothing works (PR 137668 or 136762 as examples in my case).

Besides that, I was quite surprised that these information are available in 
OpenBSD through a very simple and unique sysctl interface, with up-to-date 
drivers, working on all my servers with a generic install. I know that below 
this presentation layer, this may be much less perfect, and by digging in, I 
found that a 2007 GSoC project for porting the OpenBSD sensor framework was 
realised and planned to be put in HEAD. I also read hundreds of mails 
concerning this project, and why finally it was not commited.

As developer, I fully understand some of the concerns in these threads and
that there are probably lots of things to change and work on, integrate it
in a cleaner repository like snmp or whatever; and I'd be glad to help in 
any
possible way to improve this. But in the meantime, as netadmin, this kind of
information can be very important to prevent or diagnose major problems; so
I'd like to know what is being planned/done on this subject, as I didn't 
find any
more information related to this than a discussion during bsdcan 2008.

Thanks for your help and time,
Aurélien