Community
- Command Central
- MVP Program
- Monthly Mission
- Blogs
- Groups
- Events
- Media Vault
Products
- Observability
- Network Management
- Application Management
- IT Security
- IT Service Management
- System Management
- Database Management
Content Exchange
- SolarWinds Platform
- Server & Application Monitor
- Database Performance Analyzer
- Server Configuration Monitor
- Network Performance Monitor
- Network Configuration Manager
- SQL Sentry
- Web Help Desk
Free Tools & Trials

Best Option for monitoring a Dell PowerEdge R750xa running Ubuntu?

rickas

I have a few Dell PowerEdge R750xa running Ubuntu.

What are my monitoring options?

I figure I could do SNMP polling to the iDRAC9.

Or I could install an agent on the Ubuntu OS (I tried, but had issues with certificates being unsigned).

I also saw OpenManage Server Admin as an option.

Any thoughts on what the differences are, and which road I should take?

Find more posts tagged with

idrac9

Accepted answers

All comments

monitoringlife

SNMP to the linux OS for agentless is my to go. There is also a linux agent.

You can additionally monitor the DRAC/IPMI for hardware metrics (via SNMP). I am not as up to date with Dell these days but most Dell and HP have a binary you can install to the OS that pull pull in the IPMI metrics to the OS and SolarWinds will retrieve those metrics for you. If not you can directly monitor them. Really depends on the vendor on which info the expose but I like doing the OS version as its easier, you can bake the binary into your image/baseline management, and its 'just there / out of the box' when you discover your server (and single pane of glass / on the same view).

sales page: https://www.solarwinds.com/server-application-monitor/use-cases/hardware-monitor

Demo example: https://hco.demo.solarwinds.com/Orion/NetPerfMon/NodeDetails.aspx?NetObject=N:550

akhasheni

[quote userid="60518" url="~/product-forums/the-orion-platform/f/forum/99799/best-option-for-monitoring-a-dell-poweredge-r750xa-running-ubuntu/313673#313673"]most Dell and HP have a binary you can install to the OS that pull pull in the IPMI metrics to the OS and SolarWinds will retrieve those metrics for you[/quote]

For Dell, that binary appears to be OMSA for Linux. (It's a large package; you may only need to install base OMSA (srvadmin-base).)

Best instructions (that I found) on how to install:

Dell OpenManage Ubuntu and Debian Repositories

This is what worked for me (Ubuntu 22.04 LTS on r730):

$ sudo echo 'deb http://linux.dell.com/repo/community/openmanage/11000/jammy jammy main' | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/linux.dell.com.sources.list

deb http://linux.dell.com/repo/community/openmanage/11000/jammy jammy main

$ sudo wget https://linux.dell.com/repo/pgp_pubkeys/0x1285491434D8786F.asc

--2023-09-19 15:43:54--  https://linux.dell.com/repo/pgp_pubkeys/0x1285491434D8786F.asc
Resolving linux.dell.com (linux.dell.com)... 143.166.156.113
Connecting to linux.dell.com (linux.dell.com)|143.166.156.113|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 4250 (4.2K) [text/plain]
Saving to: ‘0x1285491434D8786F.asc’

0x1285491434D8786F.asc        100%[=================================================>]   4.15K  --.-KB/s    in 0s

2023-09-19 15:43:55 (139 MB/s) - ‘0x1285491434D8786F.asc’ saved [4250/4250]


$ sudo apt-key add 0x1285491434D8786F.asc

Warning: apt-key is deprecated. Manage keyring files in trusted.gpg.d instead (see apt-key(8)).
OK

$ sudo apt-get update
Hit:2 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu jammy InRelease
Hit:3 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu jammy-updates InRelease
Hit:4 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu jammy-backports InRelease
Get:1 https://linux.dell.com/repo/community/openmanage/11000/jammy jammy InRelease [2,509 B]
Hit:5 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu jammy-security InRelease
Get:6 https://linux.dell.com/repo/community/openmanage/11000/jammy jammy/main amd64 Packages [7,053 B]
Fetched 9,562 B in 1s (8,569 B/s)
Reading package lists... Done
W: http://linux.dell.com/repo/community/openmanage/11000/jammy/dists/jammy/InRelease: Key is stored in legacy trusted.gpg keyring (/etc/apt/trusted.gpg), see the DEPRECATION section in apt-key(8) for details.

$ sudo apt-get install srvadmin-all

... and then:

$ sudo /opt/dell/srvadmin/sbin/srvadmin-services.sh start

After that, ran "list resources" on the node in SolarWinds, and hardware health showed up:

(The 27TB RAID volume however did not - still trying to figure this out...Likely the SNMP service being buggy and not working with large volumes.)

P.S. Instructions here (Systems Management: How to Install OpenManage Server Administrator on Linux, either manual or repo-based) - did not work for me: a number of errors including "Unrecognized / Unsupported Operating System or Architecture":

root@dellsrvr:/home/****/OMSA# bash ./setup.sh
./setup.sh: line 4044: continue: only meaningful in a `for', `while', or `until' loop
     Unrecognized / Unsupported Operating System or Architecture. This script cannot
     continue with the installation. Select rpms from the OS folder in
     the media that closely matches this Operating System to continue
     with the manual install.

Hope this help!