Environmental Monitoring - RoomAlert

Keeping a close eye on your data center environment (temperatures, humididty) can be quite tough but is a must. I recently implemented a unit from Room Alet (http://www.roomalert.com/) to do just that. Power up the unit, plugin data and you immediately have a bead on temperature and humidity.

I married the device to a few external probes (that connect back to the unit via rj11); these included one external temp/humidity sensor, three other temp probes, and a door probe. The management interface (java) is very intuitive and setup of external probes is simple. One of the most important requirements that I had for a device was SNMP access; the 24e reports all data via SNMP. MIBs can be downloaded from their website and after a few quick walks you will find the OID's of interest.

Below is an example of one of the custom graphs that I created via snmp, Cacti, and rrdtool. The following graph reports individual HVAC unit air temperature (3), humidity in 2 seperate places in room, rack temperatures, and door status.


By trending this data we are able to better understand both the health of our HVAC environment and how the environment reacts to external and internal events.