Table of Contents

Overview

Hardware Sentry OpenTelemetry Collector is a distribution of the OpenTelemetry Collector which monitors the health of the hardware of any kind of computer, network switch or storage system, and exposes the corresponding metrics to any observability platform supporting OpenTelemetry like Datadog, BMC Helix, Prometheus, Splunk, etc.

Hardware Sentry OpenTelemetry Collector Architecture

Thanks to its internal library of 250+ Hardware Connectors, Hardware Sentry OpenTelemetry Collector can monitor almost any system from any manufacturer (Cisco, Dell, EMC, Fujitsu, Hitachi, HP, IBM, Lenovo, NetApp, Oracle, etc.) through SNMP, IPMI, HTTP, WBEM, WMI, WINRM or SSH.

Hardware Sentry OpenTelemetry Collector monitors the health of the internal electronic components of the system:

  • Batteries
  • Blades
  • CPUs
  • GPUs
  • LEDs
  • Memory modules
  • Network cards
  • Power supplies
  • Robotics
  • Sensors
    • Temperatures
    • Voltages
    • Fans
    • Power
  • Storage
    • Controllers
    • Disks
    • RAIDs
    • HBAs
    • LUNs
    • Tape drives
  • Virtual Machines
  • etc.

Hardware Sentry OpenTelemetry Collector also reports the energy usage and costs, as well as the carbon emissions of the monitored systems.

What's in the box?

Hardware Sentry OpenTelemetry Collector includes:

  • a standard OpenTelemetry Collector
  • the Hardware Sentry Agent
  • the Hardware Connector Library
  • Hardware Sentry CLI (hws)

OpenTelemetry Collector

Hardware Sentry OpenTelemetry Collector is comprised of:

  • The OpenTelemetry Collector executable
    • The OpenTelemetry configuration file (otel-config.yaml)
    • The Hardware Sentry Agent
      • Its configuration file (hws-config.yaml)
      • The monitoring engine, with the Hardware Connector Library

Internal architecture of the Hardware Sentry OpenTelemetry Collector

The OpenTelemetry Collector is in charge of:

  1. Spawning the internal Hardware Sentry Agent
  2. Pulling its metrics periodically (internally)
  3. Pushing these metrics to the specified platform

Hardware Sentry Agent

The internal Hardware Sentry Agent is the engine that performs the actual monitoring of the systems, based on its configuration file, which specifies:

  • its internal polling cycle
  • the hostnames and credentials of the systems to monitor.

The Hardware Sentry Agent is the internal component which is responsible of scraping hosts, collecting metrics and pushing OTLP data to the OTLP receiver of the OpenTelemetry Collector.

Hardware Connector Library

The library of 250+ Hardware Connectors is included in the Hardware Sentry Agent. It is the same library that powers Hardware Sentry KM for PATROL, the original and battle-seasoned module for PATROL, created in 2004 by Sentry Software and used on hundreds of thousands of systems around the world.

The platforms that can be monitored by Hardware Sentry OpenTelemetry Collector entirely depends on this library. More details about the Hardware Connector Library are available as a separate documentation.

Hardware Sentry CLI (hws)

The Hardware Sentry CLI contains the same engine and library of Hardware Connectors as Hardware Sentry Agent, but packaged as a command line interface, that can be invoked in a shell.

This tool is particularly useful to troubleshoot the monitoring of a system, protocols and credentials.

Keywords:
about hardware observability opentelemetry otel sustainability
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