This is a broad subject. Technology has never really been the issue of effectively monitoring an IT infrastructure. We've had the tools for over 20 years now and the problem has always been effective use of and implemenation of tools, It should start from the top with 4 things: a plan, a team/roles, the toolset, and processes to manage the infrastructure.
You raise the issue of non trivial methods so that suggests you're more interested in technical mechanisms. In this case it's best to ask something more specific. The best area I can point you to is this concept that is emerging and it's arguably steeped in virtualization. The concept is Reliability and Serviceabilty (RAS). Computation is becoming non-stop and this means that you can still compute and service the machine at the same time. Hardware reliability is well defined and there are predictive methods for handling this. In fact,every component, network, o/s... is well defined...so I don't really understand the "non-trivial" methods part. Whatever the specific, monitoring in general should support the emerging concept of RAS. Now that term has been mainly associated with hardware, but I think the concept extends to the entire infrastructure. I would be interested to hear more of what you have been working on and what you're targeting.
What is the best way to learn UNIX, shell, and Perl on a Windows 2000 machine? My place of employment uses Solaris and Perl and I would like to learn some UNIX skills on my home PC.
I read about "dual boots", "Microsoft Windows Services for UNIX", and "cygwin". What other free options are... (9 Replies)
SENSORS-DETECT(8) System Manager's Manual SENSORS-DETECT(8)NAME
sensors-detect - detect hardware monitoring chips
SYNOPSIS
sensors-detect
DESCRIPTION
sensors-detect is an interactive program that will walk you through the process of scanning your system for various hardware monitoring
chips, or sensors, supported by libsensors(3), or more generally by the lm_sensors tool suite.
sensors-detect will look for the following devices, in order:
o Sensors embedded in CPUs, south bridges and memory controllers.
o Sensors embedded in Super I/O chips.
o Hardware monitoring chips accessed through ISA I/O ports.
o Hardware monitoring chips reachable over the SMBus or more generally any I2C bus on your system.
As the last two detection steps can cause trouble on some systems, they are normally not attempted if the second detection step led to the
discovery of a Super I/O chip with complete hardware monitoring features. However, the user is always free to ask for all detection steps
if so is his/her wish. This can be useful if a given system has more than one hardware monitoring chip. Some vendors are known to do this,
most notably Asus and Tyan.
WARNING
sensors-detect needs to access the hardware for most of the chip detections. By definition, it doesn't know which chips are there before
it manages to identify them. This means that it can access chips in a way these chips do not like, causing problems ranging from SMBus
lockup to permanent hardware damage (a rare case, thankfully.)
The authors made their best to make the detection as safe as possible, and it turns out to work just fine in most cases, however it is
impossible to guarantee that sensors-detect will not lock or kill a specific system. So, as a rule of thumb, you should not run sensors-
detect on production servers, and you should not run sensors-detect if can't afford replacing a random part of your system. Also, it is
recommended to not force a detection step which would have been skipped by default, unless you know what you are doing.
SEE ALSO sensors(1), libsensors(3)AUTHOR
Frodo Looijaard and Jean Delvare
lm-sensors 3 December 2008 SENSORS-DETECT(8)