Sensors Data Monitoring

A sensor is a device or subsystem that can detect changes in its environment and send the information to other electronics to help measure how well the equipment in the environment is functioning. Sensors can collect event data (time series data) that measures all kinds of data including but not limited to temperature, pressure, flow, vibrations or even chemical properties of materials such as fluid viscosity.

This sensor data is used in all kinds of applications — from personal devices like wearables to detect how your body is functioning, manufacturing and machinery, airplanes and aerospace, cars, medicine, and robotics.

Why use the Sensors Telegraf Plugin?

The Sensor Telegraf Plugin can help you collect sensor metrics with any sensor executable from the Linux-monitoring (lm-sensor) package. lm_sensors is a free open source software tool for Linux that provides tools and drivers for monitoring temperatures, voltage, humidity, and fans.

Using this Sensor Telegraf Plugin — in conjunction with the many other Telegraf plugins like ModBus, MQTT, and OPC UA — can help you collect metrics from many types of sensors found in homes, factories, energy production sites, etc. Collecting all this data in a single time series database like InfluxDB can help you gain performance insights, predict maintenance cycles, as well as find optimization opportunities.

How to monitor using the Sensor Telegraf plugin

You can configure the Sensor Telegraf Plugin to collect and store metrics and events in fields in InfluxDB from sensors that support lm-sensor. This does require that the lm-sensors package is installed as this plugin collects sensor metrics with the sensors executable from the lm-sensor package.

Key Sensor metrics to use for monitoring

Measurements & Fields:

• Fields are created dynamically depending on the sensors. All fields are float.

Tags:

• All measurements have the following tags:
  • chip
  • feature

Example Output:

Default

$ telegraf --config telegraf.conf --input-filter sensors --test
* Plugin: sensors, Collection 1
> sensors,chip=power_meter-acpi-0,feature=power1 power_average=0,power_average_interval=300 1466751326000000000
> sensors,chip=k10temp-pci-00c3,feature=temp1 temp_crit=70,temp_crit_hyst=65,temp_input=29,temp_max=70 1466751326000000000
> sensors,chip=k10temp-pci-00cb,feature=temp1 temp_input=29,temp_max=70 1466751326000000000
> sensors,chip=k10temp-pci-00d3,feature=temp1 temp_input=27.5,temp_max=70 1466751326000000000
> sensors,chip=k10temp-pci-00db,feature=temp1 temp_crit=70,temp_crit_hyst=65,temp_input=29.5,temp_max=70 1466751326000000000

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