Prometheus IPMI Exporter

This is an IPMI exporter for Prometheus.

It supports both the regular /metrics endpoint, exposing metrics from the host on which the exporter runs, as well as a /ipmi endpoint that supports IPMI over RMCP, implementing the multi-target exporter pattern. If you plan to use the latter, please read the guide Understanding and using the multi-target exporter pattern for an overview of that paradigm.

By default, the exporter relies on tools from the FreeIPMI suite for the actual IPMI implementation.

There is, however, experimental support for using the Go-native go-ipmi library instead of FreeIPMI. Feedback to help mature this support would be greatly appreciated. Please read the native IPMI documentation if you are interested.

Installation

For most use-cases, simply download the the latest release.

For Kubernetes, you can use the community-maintained Helm chart.

Pre-built container images are available on dockerhub and quay.io.

Building from source

You need a Go development environment. Then, simply run make to build the executable:

make

This uses common Prometheus tooling to build the exporter and run tests.

Alternatively, you can use standard Go tooling, which will install the executable in $GOPATH/bin:

go install github.com/prometheus-community/ipmi_exporter@latest

Building a container image

You can build a container image with the included docker make target:

make promu
promu crossbuild -p linux/amd64 -p linux/arm64
make docker

Running

A minimal invocation looks like this:

./ipmi_exporter

Supported parameters include:

• web.listen-address: the address/port to listen on (default: ":9290")
• config.file: path to the configuration file (default: none)
• freeipmi.path: path to the FreeIPMI executables (default: rely on $PATH)

For syntax and a complete list of available parameters, run:

./ipmi_exporter -h

Ensure that the following tools from the FreeIPMI suite are installed:

• ipmimonitoring/ipmi-sensors
• ipmi-dcmi
• ipmi-raw
• bmc-info
• ipmi-sel
• ipmi-chassis

When running a container image, make sure to:

• set config.file to the path of the config file as seen within the container
• expose the default TCP port (9290) or set web.listen-address accordingly

NOTE: you should use containers only when collecting remote metrics.

Configuration

The configuration document describes both the configuration of the IPMI exporter itself as well as configuring the Prometheus server to scrape it.

TLS and basic authentication

The IPMI Exporter supports TLS and basic authentication.

To use TLS and/or basic authentication, you need to pass a configuration file using the --web.config.file parameter. The format of the file is described in the exporter-toolkit repository.

Exported data

For a description of the metrics that this exporter provides, see the metrics document.

Privileges

Collecting host-local IPMI metrics requires root privileges. See privileges document for how to avoid running the exporter as root.