North American Network Operators Group

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Re: environmental monitors

  • From: Sean Donelan
  • Date: Fri Dec 22 17:39:34 2000

On Fri, 22 December 2000, Jimmy Kyriannis wrote:
> While we're on the topic of small devices...  What are folks' 
> experience with SNMP-manageable environmental sensors for 
> temperature, humidity, electrical variations, etc., for remote 
> monitoring of data closets, comm rooms, enclosed racks, etc.?

There are a whole gaggle of them, ranging in price from $200 to $20,000.
Each have their own quirks and monitor different things.  Everyone does
temperature, most do humidity, few do electrical.  With dry or wet contacts
you can connect additional devices such as door ajar, smoke or leak detectors.

Standalone units

Liebert sitenet integrator: http://www.liebert.com/
Nbase-Xyplex enviromental manager: http://www.nbase-xyplex.com/
NetBotz: http://www.netbotz.com/
Sierra Monitor environmental controller: http://www.sierramonitor.com/
Versalynx environmental monitor: http://www.versalynx.com/

I have my preferences, but in most cases I needed to add some additional
sensors using a few dry contacts or analog inputs.

There are also a number of units integrated with some other piece
of equipment (e.g. a UPS) or require an additional PC to run the
SNMP agent software.

What I find interesting is very few people have any type of environmental
monitoring, and even fewer monitor the sensors they do have by any
operation center.  Maybe I'm just weird, and used to monitor too many
things too closely.  Besides the temperature of their cisco router, do
people regularly monitor other environmental parameters in their POPs?