Aircon monitoring help
 

Hi guys,

I have this majour problemo!!

I came to work on Monday to find that our small but very awsome server room was about to blow!!!

Ok so blowing up is an overstatement however everything was on the brink of frying due to the heat.

Our aircon is designed to send us a warning if it fails for whatever reason but due to the fact the whole aircon unit broke we recieved no such alert.

It's obvious to me now that this feature on the our aircon unit is completely useless and i've been a fool for thinking that it would ever work in the first place!

I started to look into third party solutions for this that are affordable but i either got products that seemed rubbish or solutions that where way too expensive for me to even think about justifying the costs!

So i guess this is a long roundabout way of asking anyone if they have discovered any decent serverroom monitoring solutions that are affordable?

We've had good success with devices from AKCP. Also, I can recommend NetBotz, although these products are much higher-priced.

Ken

There is a product that we have recently invested in called the Climate.

It sits in our server room and monitors temperature, airflow, humidity, light and sound.

For the cost it has more built in 'goodies' than others we looked at. The sensors all come as standard and since then we have bought some cheap add-ons such as external temp sensors which we use for other areas in the comms room.

All the data is presented in a graph that is displayed in its on-board website.

The alerts we recieve can either be in email or text format so i can even get alerts out of office hours. Dont quote me on this but I thnk the company is Swiftbase or The Climate, worth checking out anyway;

The Original Climate - Home

Hope this helps paperclip!

Good Afternoon. I can tell you that my favourite monitoring tool for a datacenter is extremely basic and does not give me any features I dont need.

I have used a product from Sensaphone before. Instead of e-mailing you, it will actually call you with the status of the server room. You can also call it at anytime to get an update on the status of your server room. I find e-mail alerts are somewhat pointless unless you have 24x7 staffing to read emails or you are checking e-mails frequently.

It used to call me and say "Temperature 1 is high" then it would give me the temperature readings for all my zones. The noise monitoring sneaks up on you, so you have to be careful! The buzzer for our fire alarm was somewhat near the unit and it called me and said "Sound level is high, listen to the sound for 10 seconds" that is all the warning it gives...then it opens the mic and you have to quickly pull the phone away from your ear.

The best feature of this device is that the basic model with 4 sensor inputs is only $395 (List MSRP). Sensaphone - Model 400 Basic Monitoring

If you froogle it, you can find them for ~ $355

Good Luck!

We use Sensorsoft. Temperature monitoring from Sensorsoft

I wasn't involved with the product research. It was kinda like "here it is, get it working". We use it's temperature/humidity sensors throughout our whole warehouse and datacenter. It has the email/pager notifications that everyone likes. It is also capable of dry-contact monitoring and camera use. Like a lot of applications these days, its web-enabled. Basic system looks pretty economical for $199.

We are looking to implement a Geist product:
Geist Manufacturing - RSMINI163 Environmental Monitor
16 port remote sensor unit. large vendor quoted me under 350 bucks for one...each cable is then about 40 bucks. you can mix and match your sensors to what you need and cover a large area. i'm looking to deploy 3 of these setups.

Thats interesting... I was looking into IT WatchDog's WaterSnake for a new build I am working on, and they seem to sell exactly the same product.

Geist Manufacturing

WaterSnake Configuration Guide (HTML)

I wonder who the true manufacturer is, and where they are buying them white label from!

that is pretty interesting...