Remote weather stations use Ravica SensorProbes
Filed under: environmental monitoring, humidity monitoring, temperature monitoring
I love finding new ways people are using our probes! I just finished a call with a university up here in the north land, who wanted to use our probes in their remote data station. The remote data station is part of a funded study to determine the changing weather conditions in the area.
The problem is that the grant they received would fund the weather monitoring equipment, but not the equipment that would run the unmanned station. The good news is that their technology budget would cover the BitSight8 and the required sensors.
They needed to be able to monitor temperature, humidity, airflow and security. The customer explained to me that since this was an unmanned station, knowing if anyone has opened the server room door was extremely important.
We spent some time talking about the various environmental conditions and how they can affect the servers. He was surprised how the environmental conditions would effect the station’s performance.
The environmental conditions of the area can change throughout the year. The winters can drop below zero, while the temperature during the summer months is in the 90′s with high humidity. Monitoring for humidity is vital; condensation on a circuit board can kill a machine. Having a monitor in place is absolutely vital.
We then went over the alerting and reporting ability of the probe and how this unmanned station’s IT center would be fully monitored. I also spent some time explaining the SecurityProbe and how it would alert them when someone opened the door. I am looking forward to the install date. I hope that it is in the summer. I hate snow!
- JimmyD
The SensorProbe can Tweet!
Filed under: environmental monitoring, humidity monitoring, temperature monitoring
I don’t want to ride on the coat tails of Jon’s post about being able to send temperature alerts via Skype, but I guess I have no choice. I quickly wanted to point out that you can also send Twitter alerts form your SensorProbe. I imagined this as a second wave alert. Kinda that last ditch effort before the ship goes down. Ok, maybe I am being a bit over dramatic but in reality, this can be a great way to do a broadcast alert.
The process is easy. Browse to TwitterMail, insert your twitter username and password to get your TwitterMail address instantly. Then go to your SensorProbe and create an email alert. Alert goes off, email is sent and Twitter is fed. Make sure that everyone that is supposed to recive these messages are followers of your Twitter account.
My Ravica sensorProbe woke me up! Time for some coffee.
What a morning here at our Network operations center. My cell phone paged me at 2:00 am letting me know that server room 4 was overheating. After I grumbled a few choice words, I got out of bed to see what the issue might be. I also received another page from the air flow probe .
I logged into Denika and then clicked on the SvrRoom4 report group. I pat myself on the back for being super smart. When we set up this server room I made sure to setup reports for the various Ravica probes and complimented them with other related SNMP reports. I have quite a few, port utilization, memory, CPU utilization and most importantly System Temperature.
So I looked at the reports. I drilled down in the historical graph and could see that the air flow sensor saw a steady decline a little after 1:30 am. I then went over to the temp sensor and started to see the temp climb around 1:45 am. The temperature sensor reached the threshold at 1:55 am.
At this point I was a bit puzzled. We had placed the air flow sensor by the cooling unit but the AC voltage detector was reporting fine. That means the environmental fan was running.
I’m lucky, I was the designer of this server room and was adamant about having a security light that I could turn off or on remotely. So I sent the command to turn on the light and then logged into the webcam. The good news is that I could see what happened. We had stacked some cardboard boxes on that wall and one had fallen in front of the vent. That means that fan was running but air couldn’t get out.
The good news is that I was able to find and remedy the problem quickly. The bad news is that I had to get dressed and drive over to the office and move the boxes. I did make sure to stack all the boxes on top of the desk of the person who was supposed to get rid of them in the first place!
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Jim Dougherty aka “Jimmy D”
Lead PreSales Support Engineer and
Netflow Evangelist for Plixer International!
Follow me on Twitter
http://twitter.com/jimmydnet
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