HACKER Q&A
📣 rckoepke

Best environmental monitoring front end for large lab, small datacenter?


We have about 3000 physical servers in our R&D lab. We have various environmental sensors (server temps, rack temps, room temp, humidity, HVAC statuses, etc) already accessible behind disparate portals.

I'm moving all these to one frontend. Are there some solutions for this that people here like? I'd love to be able to share all the dashboards with the rest of my team, send out emails automatically when things break, and also send emails when they appear fixed.

Obviously it's not too hard to do this from scratch, but figured it might make sense not to reinvent the wheel if there's something excellent available.


  👤 wikibob Accepted Answer ✓
What’s your budget?

If you want a fancy easy to use UI you can consider getting the data into something like DataDog. But it’s expensive.

For lower budget, consider Prometheus and Grafana. You will need to write glue code to get the the data points wired to prometheus.

For a scalable backend consider Grafana cloud, or you can run Cortex or Thanos yourself.

What resolution do you want? That is how frequently do you want to save a datapoint?


👤 PaulWaldman
What systems/protocols are your environmental systems using?

A common monitoring stack is Telegraf/InfluxDB or Prometheus for monitoring and storage. Grafana for visualization.