What is IPMI

IPMI is an industry-standard protocol for monitoring the status of a computer and making some basic operations on it, such as powering on/off, monitoring temperature, Fan's speed and informations relative to the chassis. IPMI is a specification made by Intel, Cyclades, Dell, IBM, and many others famous hardware vendors. The acronym I.P.M.I stands for Intelligent Platform Management Interface. With a computer has an hardware IPMI-oriented, this can be monitored without interfacing with the main processor, leaving it free for the other tasks, without a continuative polling-time with the sensors, present on the hardware non-IPMI enabled. Due to this, a machine shipped with this technology can be monitored also if the main processor is failing. Such hardware, called BMC (Baseboard Management Controller) is really expensive, and may be generate some network traffic. IPMI can work with standard ethernet protocols (called IN-BAND) or via serial links, (called Serial-Over-LAN, SOL, OUT-OF-BAND). With the data collected by IPMI, one can be able to construct time series of what happens to a data center, seeing and monitoring some critical parts, like FAN or Chassis and CPU temperature. Due to the fact that all the IPMI implementations are command line oriented packages, it is easier to present to the data center system(s) administrator(s) in a fancy way, like a web page or a santdalone application. Some opensource implementation exports a shared library (usually written in pure ANSI C) that can be called from everywhere.