White Paper Telemetry Streaming with iDRAC9 – Metric Reports Using Rsyslog Abstract Dell EMC PowerEdge Servers with iDRAC9 4.x Datacenter streams data to help IT administrators better understand the inner workings of their server environment. This white paper explains the process of configuring iDRAC9 to stream telemetry reports using Rsyslog. This paper also covers configurations that are required at server side to receive and process the reports.
Revisions Revisions Date Description April 2020 Initial release Acknowledgments Authors: Sankunny Jayaprasad, Aaron Colichia, Sankara Gara, Cyril Jose, Sailaja Mahendrakar The information in this publication is provided “as is.” Dell Inc. makes no representations or warranties of any kind with respect to the information in this publication, and specifically disclaims implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
Table of contents Table of contents 3 1 Telemetry Overview .....................................................................................................................................................5 2 Streaming reports over RSyslogs.................................................................................................................................6 3 Streaming reports over RSyslog with TLS ........................................................................................
Executive summary Executive summary Beginning with iDRAC9 v4.00.00.00 firmware and a Datacenter license, IT managers can integrate advanced server hardware operation telemetry into their existing analytics solutions. Telemetry is provided as granular, timeseries data that is streamed, or pushed, compared to inefficient, legacy polling, or pulled, methods. The advanced agent-free architecture in iDRAC9 provides over 180 data metrics that are related to server and peripherals operations.
Technical support and resources 1 Telemetry Overview Telemetry enables users to collect metric and data logs from various devices on PowerEdge server. Also, it provides streaming the data to the subscribed external client or server application. Using telemetry, it is possible to set types of reports and the frequency of reports that must be generated. 1.1 Prerequisites 5 The Telemetry feature is available on iDRAC9 firmware version 4.00.00.00 or above and requires a Datacenter license.
Technical support and resources 2 Streaming reports over Rsyslog iDRAC can stream telemetry reports to Rsyslog servers that require an SSL certificate, and ones that do not require an SSL certificate. The streaming is either event or schedule based. On-demand streaming over Rsyslog is not supported. 2.1 iDRAC Configurations There are few configuration changes that must be applied at iDRAC side to enable the telemetry streaming over Rsyslog. 2.1.
Technical support and resources 2.1.2 Viewing Rsyslog related configurations To view and verify that the settings applied using above commands, use RACADM ‘get’ command. racadm>>get idrac.telemetry [Key=idrac.Embedded.1#Telemetry.1] EnableTelemetry=Enabled RSyslogServer1=10.100.100.11 RSyslogServer1Port=514 RSyslogServer2=100.65.84.123 RSyslogServer2Port=514 2.
Technical support and resources 3 Streaming reports over Rsyslog with TLS Telemetry supports streaming reports to a TLS enabled rsyslog server. The configuration for enabling this feature is identical to normal rsyslog streaming. There is an exception that the CA certificate used by the Rsyslog server must be uploaded to the iDRAC. Uploading the CA certificate can be done using RACADM or SCP. Uploading CA certificate through Redfish/WSMAN/iDRAC GUI is not supported. 3.1.
Technical support and resources 3.1.2 Viewing rsyslog CA certificate using RACADM # racadm -r 192.168.1.2 -u root -p calvin --nocertwarn sslcertview -t 8 -i 1 Serial Number Subject Information: Common Name (CN) Issuer Information: Common Name (CN) Valid From Valid To 3.1.3 : 5D83A7A11856C555 : example.delllabs.net : example.delllabs.
Technical support and resources 4 Generating metric reports from Rsyslog files iDRAC telemetry reports are streamed as message chunks in order to overcome the syslog message size limitation. The chunks include metadata at the beginning so that the messages can be reassembled to form the complete message. The message can be assembled based on metadata consisting of Message SeqNo, Total chunks, and Chunk Number. A sample aggregation python script is available in the GitHub. www.github.
Technical support and resources A Technical support and resources iDRAC Telemetry Workflow examples https://github.com/dell/iDRAC-Telemetry-Scripting/ Open-source iDRAC REST API with Redfish Python and PowerShell examples. https://github.com/dell/iDRAC-Redfish-Scripting The iDRAC support home page provides access to product documents, technical white papers, how-to videos, and more. www.dell.com/support/idrac iDRAC User Guide and other manuals www.dell.com/idracmanuals Dell Technical Support www.Dell.
