Monitoring Temperature and Fan Speed Using Ganglia and Winbond Chips

摘要

Effective monitoring is essential to keep a large group of machines, like the ones at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), up and running. SLAC currently uses Ganglia Monitoring System to observe about 2000 machines, analyzing metrics like CPU usage and I/O rate. However, metrics essential to machine hardware health, such as temperature and fan speed, are not being monitored. Many machines have a Winbond w83782d chip which monitors three temperatures, two of which come from dual CPUs, and returns the information when the sensor command is invoked. Ganglia also provides a feature, gmetric, that allows the users to monitor their own metrics and incorporate them into the monitoring system. The programming language Perl is chosen to implement a script that invokes the sensors command, extracts the temperature and fan speed information, and calls gmetric with the appropriate arguments. Two machines were used to test the script; the two CPUs on each machine run at about 65 Celsius, which is well within the operating temperature range (The maximum safe temperature range is 77-82 Celsius for the Pentium III processors being used). Installing the script on all machines with a Winbond w83782d chip allows the SLAC Scientific Computing and Computing Services group (SCCS) to better evaluate current cooling methods.