By now, we are familiar with monitoring using Zabbix agents, SNMP, and several other methods. While SNMP is very popular and available on the majority of network-attached devices, there's another protocol that is aimed at system management and monitoring: Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI). IPMI is usually implemented as a separate management and monitoring module, independent of the host operating system, that can also provide information when the machine is powered down. IPMI is becoming more and more popular, and Zabbix has direct IPMI support. IPMI is especially popular on so-called lights-out or out-of-band management cards, available for most server hardware available today. As such, it might be desirable to monitor the status of hardware directly from these cards, as that does not depend on the operating system type, or even whether it's running at all.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Getting an IPMI device
• Preparing for IPMI monitoring
• Setting up IPMI items
• Monitoring discrete sensors