Building your own DCIM from Grafana and $50 of sensors

pieter_rtm

Member OP

Joined:: Jul 2024
Posts:: 195
From:: Rotterdam, NL

11mo ago · edited

6 #1

To be honest, most DCIM suites are overpriced bloat. As said, here's what I run at two edge sites.

Hardware:
- 10x SHT30 temp/humidity sensors ($2.80/ea)
- 3x INA219 current sensors ($4.50/ea)
- Raspberry Pi 4 with PoE HAT (already had)
- Total: $47.30

Stack:
- Prometheus node_exporter on PDU management LAN
- Telegraf on Pi, MQTT to Grafana Cloud
- Alerts via webhook to PagerDuty

Dashboard shows:
- Per-rack power
- "Ambient" temperature (ceiling-mounted sensors)
- Humidity trendlines

400+ upvotes later, still running clean. No licensing headaches. No "unlimited" support contracts.

Config snippets below if useful.

[[inputs.mqtt_consumer]]
  servers = ["tcp://10.0.30.5:1883"]
  topics = ["sensors/+/temperature"]
  data_format = "value"
  data_type = "float"

Containers before it was cool

tomchan

Member

Joined:: Jul 2024
Posts:: 202
From:: Bristol, UK

11mo ago · edited

#2

Fun little project, it actually works!

I did similar with a Hetzner remote hands closet. Used your Telegraf config almost verbatim.

[[inputs.http]]
  urls = ["http://10.0.30.10/api/power"]
  data_format = "json"

One tweak: I added UPS charge percentage to the same dashboard. Handy during the last "scheduled maintenance" that wasn't scheduled.

works on my bench ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

JO

joe26

Member

Joined:: Jul 2024
Posts:: 7

11mo ago · edited

#3

What PoE HAT are you using, the official one?

wendy

Member

Joined:: Jun 2024
Posts:: 164
From:: Manchester, UK

11mo ago · edited

#4

Which Grafana version, 10 or the new 11?

Have you tried restarting it?

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