ipmimex is a metrics exporter for platform services providing an "Intelligent Platform Management Interface" (IPMI) version <= 2.0. ipmimex uses this protocol to collect desired data and optionally exposes them via HTTP in Prometheuse exposition format using the endpoint URL http://hostname:9290/metrics (port and IP are customizable of course) and thus visualized e.g. using Grafana, Netdata, or Zabbix.
Basically ipmimex is able to retrieve and expose all data from IPMI services (e.g. running on a Baseboard Management Controller (BMC)) you may query manually using ipmitool sdr type {Temperature|Voltage|Fan}
and ipmitool dcmi power reading
. But instead of the fork/exec nightmare seen on other IPMI metrics exporters (and their inefficient, slow data processing/resource usage) ipmimex is a real daemon written in C, which caches as much data as possible and talks directly to the IPMI service - per default via /dev/ipmi0 (the OpenIPMI interface of modern Linux kernels) or /dev/bmc (Solaris 11).
Since efficiency, size and simplicity of the utility is one of its main goals, OEM specific records/data get ignored (haven't seen yet any OEM specific data exposed via IPMI, which are worth to monitor). Beside libprom to handle some prometheus (PROM) related stuff and libmicrohttpd to provide http access, no 3rd party libraries, tools, etc. are used. Last but not least there is intentionally no IPMI LAN[+] support to query e.g. remote services. The basic idea is to run ipmimex as a local service on the machine to monitor and use OS tools and services (firewall, http proxy, VictoriaMetrics vmagent, and the like) to control access to exposed data.
Adjust the Makefile if needed, optionally set related environment variables
(e.g. export USE_CC=gcc
) and run GNU make.
The official repository for ipmimex is https://github.com/jelmd/ipmimex . If you need some new features (or bug fixes), please feel free to create an issue there using https://github.com/jelmd/ipmimex/issues .
ipmimex follows the basic idea of semantic versioning, but having the real world in mind. Therefore official releases have always THREE numbers (A.B.C), not more and not less! For nightly, alpha, beta, RC builds, etc. a .0 and possibly more dot separated digits will be append, so that one is always able to overwrite this one by using a 4th digit > 0.
Ubuntu packages for libprom and ipmimex can be found via https://pkg.cs.ovgu.de/LNF/linux/ubuntu/ (search for libprom*.deb and ipmimex*.deb). libmicrohttpd gets provided by Ubuntu itself, so using the vendor package is recommended (for Ubuntu 20.04 it is named libmicrohttpd12). Related packages with header sources files are named libprom-dev.deb and libmicrohttpd-dev.deb.